THE MASTER QUEST 



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RANTON WOODHUL. 










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COEKRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 




FESTIVAL SHRINES 










12mo. 


Net. 


50 cents 



The Master Quest 



BY 

WILL SCRANTON WOODHULL 

II 



'W 



THE ABINGDON PRESS 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 






Copyright, 1918, by 
WILL SCRANTON WOODHULL 



4o> 

MAR 25 1918 

©CI,A494236 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. The Quest 9 

II. Life and the Book 25 

III. The Miraculous Person 64 

IV. The Man from Nazareth 99 

V. The Friendship Road 151 

VI. The End of the Quest 171 



**Then Galahad on a sudden, and in a voice 
Shrilling along the hall to Arthur, called: 
'But I, Sir Arthur, saw the Holy Grail, 
I saw the Holy Grail and heard a cry — 
O Galahad, and O Galahad, follow me!' '* 



THE QUEST 

Man is ever questing greatness. He vig- 
orously protests against being insignificant. 
His distinctive phrase is, "More and more." 
He seeks always to extend the field of his 
knowledge, to enlarge the sweep of his ex- 
perience; he digs laboriously after funda- 
mental principles; he clambers dizzily among 
the mysteries. Like the sturdy Livingstone, 
he hears the unceasing call of the regions 
beyond. He is ready to go anywhere so 
long as it be forward. 

He is the eternal builder, the everlasting 
doer of deeds. The place of nothing to do 
is his deepest hell, and ennui is the keenest 
torture thereof. In the breathless strain of 
the race, in the surging tug of the wrestling, 
in the tang of achievement, he finds his 
heaven. The crown of laurel or of gold is 
merely incidental. ''The Explorer" was en- 
tirely willing that others should have the 
credit for what he did; he devoutly thanked 
God that his was the privilege of fighting his 

9 



10 THE MASTER QUEST 

way across the snowy pass and through the 
burning desert until he found the "Something 
lost behind the ranges." 

The ambitions of a man reach far. The 
very universe is circumscribed by the limits 
of his quest. He will not rest content so long 
as there is one comer unsearched, one land- 
scape unseen, one rocky rampart unsealed. 
He rejoices because his universe is so vast 
that its horizons lie beyond his farthest vision. 
He is glad because it bristles thick with un- 
answered questions. A little, elementary 
world would seem to him abominable. He 
would accomplish countless tasks, enter into 
innumerable relations, exhaust his possibili- 
ties. Man's insistent, imperious demand is 
for life dimensions. 

Most immediate in this quest for greatness 
is his longing for length of years. No man 
has time enough. His purposes far outrun 
his days. He is always making beginnings 
that can never in the longest earthly span be 
brought to completions. All that he learns 
or attempts is rudimentary and assumes in- 
finite time for development. His instinctive 
outlook dwarfs the centuries into infinitesi- 



THE QUEST 11 



mals. So vast and so certain is his appre- 
hension of life that he cannot prepare for 
death, or even expect it. He girds himself 
for an eternal race. 

There is a moral urgency in this demand 
for an extended term of life. Man's instinct 
of justice requires it. He who says that each 
receives reward for his good and his evil in 
this life manifests a very shallow psychology. 
His word directly contradicts one of the 
deepest intuitions of the race. For men look 
forward to a time when their virtues unrec- 
ompensed upon earth will be suitably re- 
warded, and they tremble lest their sins shall 
finally find them out. 

This moral expectation is wrought into the 
racial consciousness. Every heathen sacrifice 
is an effort to compound with justice, to 
placate an offended god. Perchance, Neme- 
sis may be bribed. The Buddhist, although 
he blunders terribly in his estimate of moral 
values, is compelled by this deep intuition to 
formulate for his saints and sinners ascending 
and descending series in the rebirth of souls. 
The interest of the Hebrews in a future life is 
strangely inert, but this sense of the moral 



12 THE MASTER QUEST 

inadequacy of time compelled them to place 
the fuller consequences of their good and of 
their evil deeds in the lives of their children. 
"The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon 
the children." In like manner, the worthiness 
of the parent may bring blessing to the un- 
worthy son. "Yet have I not seen the 
righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging 
bread." 

The towering prophet, Isaiah, caught from 
his outlook some glimpse of the reaches of the 
individual life, but, in his farthest distance, 
he can see only the outworking of this same 
principle. In his taunt-song against the 
ruler of Babylon, he makes the dwellers in the 
hollow realm cry out to the descending shade, 

"Thou, too, made flaccid like us. 
To us hast been leveled; 
Hurled to Sheol is the pride of thee; 
Clang of the harps of thee; 
Under thee strewn are the maggots. 
Thy coverlet, worms." 

All our worthier literature is permeated 
with the conviction of unerring moral judg- 
ments. Even where the evildoer triumphs 
and the worthy suffers to the end of the tale. 



THE QUEST 13 



there are subtle but convincing intimations 
that somewhere and somehow the scale will 
be balanced, that it is finally better to be 
good than to be evil. Sometimes the argu- 
ment for a future justice is strengthened by 
present judgment. Shakespeare, seer of souls 
and prophet of destinies, makes Macbeth in 
his remarkable soliloquy cry out as he con- 
templates the murder of his king, his guest, 
his kinsman, the good Duncan, "We'd jump 
the world to come.'' Yet this utter man of 
the world could not escape the certainty of 
the even-handed justice of God. 

"But in these cases 
We still have judgment here; . . . 
This even-handed justice 

Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice 
To our own lips." 

One great, out-thrusting message of the 
play hangs on Macbeth's carelessness con- 
cerning what lay beyond death. '^Very 
well," saith God to the challenging Scot, "we 
will jump the world to come. But you must 
know in your own heart what I will prove in 
your life that still justice will be done." 
Shakespeare would say punishment for men 



14 THE MASTER QUEST 

and reward in full measure lie beyond the 
grave, but, even if one could escape that life 
and its final judgment, let him never think 
that he can thus evade just retribution for his 
sins. The earthly punishment of Macbeth, 
the exception, serves to emphasize the deep 
faith that somewhere Duncan, the good mur- 
dered king, must receive his reward. 

Having this deep intuition and knowing 
the incomplete execution of justice in this life, 
we are ready to agree with the Book when it 
declares that "All that are in the graves shall 
hear his voice, and shall come forth; they 
that have done good, unto the resurrection of 
life; and they that have done evil, unto the 
resurrection of damnation." Man is sure 
that his quest for time enough for the doing of 
perfect justice will not be disappointed. 

At the command of love men write immor- 
tality into their definition of life. Even if 
they must hold this faith with trembling 
hands, yet they cling to it. Not all his plat- 
form assurance can keep the eloquent scoffer, 
caught in the midnight of his sorrow, from 
crying with uplifted eyes, ''Hope sees a star 
and listening love catches the rustle of a 



THE QUEST 15 



wing." And Shelley, the lark-souled pan- 
theist, in his heart-break, lifts up his eyes to 
the innumerable shining of the separate stars. 
In his tenderest of elegies for the passing of 
the boy, Keats, he makes him in one line a 
part of universal nature: 

"He is a portion of that loveliness. 
Which once he made more lovely." 

But such a philosophy of endless loss will 
not satisfy his pleading love for the boy with 
the nightingale gift. So the mourner lifts his 
eyes and with truer poet vision finds his own 
again, not scattered to the bounds of the 
universe, but compact in the same sweet 
harmony he knew before the ''jealous waters 
wrought their will." 

"Burning through the inmost veil of Heaven 
The soul of Adonais, like a star. 
Beacons from the abode where the eternal are." 

When love and loss lift their voices to- 
gether, scoflBng turns away in shame and 
doubt is silent. The longing for 

". . . the touch of a vanished hand. 
And the sound of a voice that is still" 



16 THE MASTER QUEST 

tunes the soul till it can catch the exquisite 
music of those happy matins that ring in 
triumph after the last vespers have been sung 
in tears. The night cometh, the night 
Cometh — and also the morning. And, in 
that morning and only then, the quest for 
length of days will be satisfied. 

When we turn to his demand for the 
second dimension, breadth of life, we are 
brought face to face with a strange contra- 
diction between man's situation and his am- 
bitions. He is born almost an isolated unit; 
all his life he struggles to come into innumer- 
able relations. He is plunged into a world 
whose simplest sensations are vast surprises 
to his infant mind. The wonder in a babe's 
eyes may well be caused by the discovery that 
something other than itself really exists. 
But he makes it his business to extend the 
circle of his familiarity. Man finds himself 
in the grip of narrow circumstances that 
would make him a superlative provincial save 
that he refuses to be bound by them. Almost 
from the first he seeks to be cosmopolitan. 
Far lands and strange peoples lure him on 
and on. Incidentally, one of the hopeless 



THE QUEST 17 



tragedies of our generation is its loss of 
great unexplored regions. None can ever 
know again the stinging joy of Cortez 
when 

"With eagle eyes 
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men 
Looked at each other with a wild surprise. 
Silent, upon a peak of Darien." 

Geographically, man thinks in continents; 
astronomically, in constellations; scientifi- 
cally, in boundless forces. In his eager quest 
for knowledge he ranges from the ultimate 
unit of matter to the first great Cause. He 
rebels against limits; horizons are to him 
nothing more than the nearest edges of what 
lies beyond. 

John caught something of this love for 
room when he wrote of the city and the 
country of God. But he might have made 
his vision of heaven much more spacious. 
The Father's paradise must include the in- 
finite meadows of heaven, and each separate 
star may be the home of a single soul. Noth- 
ing less ample than the owne^rship of a star in 
fee simple and the right to roam at will down 



18 THE MASTER QUEST 

the smooth roads of the sky will satisfy the 
breadth of man's aspirations. 

But so far in this matter of breadth only 
the lesser thing has been said. Some sage 
has declared that man must be greater than 
the universe, because he can think of its infi- 
nite complexity, while the whole universe can- 
not think at all of him. Which implies, beyond 
a doubt, that the breadth of a citizen of the 
universe is not equal to the latitude of life 
into which the friend of a man enters. In 
harmony with this truth is the fact that man 
imperatively cries out for the breadth of per- 
sonal contacts. He quite agrees with the 
Almighty that ''it is not good for man to 
dwell alone." He is terribly wronged if he 
be denied the song of his wife at evening time 
and the gleeful laughter of his children about 
his knees. He must be bound friend to friend 
with steel bands, the threads of his life must 
be woven into the web of the community, his 
patriotism must be linked into the chain mail 
of the nation. Otherwise, he will wither in 
the narrow cell of his own existence. Enoch 
Arden, shut in by ocean bars, and Silas Mar- 
ner, imprisoned by his own sore heart, show 



THE QUEST 19 



how bitterly destitute is the man who Uves 
by himself. Indeed, civilization is nothing 
more than the habit of living together in 
cities. Only, if it be true civilization, and not 
some deadly counterfeit, they must be Cities 
of Good Will in which all hves are woven 
together in mutual helpfulness. 

From which we may conclude that the 
fairest measure of this quest for life-breadth 
is a man's desire for brotherliood. The 
farther his intelligent sympathies extend, the 
more inclusive he makes his working defini- 
tion of the old word "brother," the broader 
will he be in every part. Ralph Whittaker 
pictures the man who has climbed far toward 
such an ideal. 

"My country is the world; I count 

No son of man my foe. 
Whether the warm life-currents mount 

On mantled brow like snow; 
Or red or yellow, brown or black. 
The face that into mine looks back. 

"My native land is mother earth. 

And all men are my kin. 
Whether of high or humble birth. 

However steeped in sin; 
And rich or poor or great or small, 
I count them brothers, one and all. 



20 THE MASTER QUEST 

"My party is all human kind. 

My platform, brotherhood; 
I hold all men of honest mind 

Who work for common good 
And for the hope that gleams afar 
My comrades in this holy war. 

"My country is the world; 

I scorn no lesser love than mine. 
But calmly wait that happy morn 

When all shall see the sign; 
And love of country, clique, and clan 
Shall yield to love of man.'* 

But length of years and breadth of sym- 
pathy will not content this eager man. He 
must have height of soul. Measurelessly 
more than Lowell's clod, he feels, 

"A stir of might. 
An instinct within that reaches and towers." 

He is the inevitable worshiper. If he 
misses the spiritual conception, then he falls 
into that splendid absurdity pilloried by 
Isaiah, and trusts silent mouths to utter 
oracles and motionless arms to fend away his 
enemies. For he must worship either the 
idol in his temple or the One who sits on the 
circle of the heavens. Nowadays, the idol 
is wrought by mind instead of hands and 
called philosophy, or it is an attitude toward 



THE QUEST 21 



life, shallow or material or stoical or agnostic. 
But it is no less their God who made it, for in 
it they trust and to it they are loyal. Under- 
neath it all is the faculty of worship, dwarfed 
or atrophied, but real nevertheless. 

Men are seeking God, but some of us are 
stereotyped in our apprehension of the ways 
in which they may feel after him. When it 
is said, "Behold, he prays," we are sure that 
here is one who is seeking the Most High. 
But we should also know that every one who 
talks seriously about the Initiatory Power is 
feeling along the hawsers of God's omnipo- 
tence. Whoever wrestles with the mysteries 
of the interwoven worlds is thinking after 
him some tiny fragments of God's omnis- 
cience. He who says, "I ought," is declaring 
allegiance to imperial conscience and is hear- 
ing the voice of the Infinite Judge. Socrates, 
who dared to speak calmly of the great 
adventure even while the hemlock wrought 
his death, must have caught some prophetic 
glimpse of the far-flung dawn that dried the 
tears of Mary in the Easter garden. 

Everywhere, men are feeling after God if 
haply they might find him. Paul touched a 



22 THE MASTER QUEST 

universal note and stirred his whole audience 
to a wondering hope when he pointed to an 
altar erected "To The Unknown God'' and 
cried, "Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly wor- 
ship, him declare I unto you.'' When that 
statesman and thinker Daniel Webster was 
asked to name the greatest thpught he had 
ever pondered, he immediately made reply, 
"The most staggering thought that ever 
entered my mind concerned my personal 
responsibility to Almighty God." Tennyson 
said to a companion one day, "God is with 
me on these downs as truly as yon are." The 
missionary Crawford insists that it is never 
necessary to tell an African that there is a 
God. He knows it already and knows it well. 
Maeterlinck declares that in these days the 
insulation of our souls is becoming thin, and 
what is within us speaks out, less and less 
hindered by the grosser envelope. Men are 
are always trying to build towers to heaven. 
' Two men faced the intellectual diflSculties 
that attend this quest for altitude of life. 
The difference between them lay in this: 
Alfred Tennyson sought and found the 
Divine Presence as he walked on the English 



THE QUEST 23 



downs as did Enoch when he was God's com- 
panion on the Asian hill slopes. But Mat- 
thew Arnold, pure-hearted agnostic, walked 
alone. One day, when wearied of the quest, 
the lonely poet sang the lament of those who 
feel that they must content themselves on 
the lower levels. 

"The sea of faith 
Was once, too, at its full, and round earth's shores 
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. 
But now I only hear 

The melancholy, long, withdrawing roar 
Retreating to the breath 
Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear 
And naked shingles of the world." 

Those who sing so sadly of the lost faith 
acknowledge that their quest had in it a long- 
ing to stand upon the heights where God is. 
The other poet sings the glad courage of him 
who will not on any terms surrender the quest 
whereof the length and the breadth and the 
height are equal. 

"Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt. 
And cling to faith beyond the forms of faith. 
She reels not in the storm of warring words. 
She brightens at the clash of *Yes' and *No,' 
She sees the Best that glimmers through the Worst, 
She feels the Sun is hid but for the night, 



24 THE MASTER QUEST 

She spies the summer through the winter bud. 
She takes the fruit before the blossom falls. 
She hears the lark within the songless egg. 
She finds the fountain where they wail'd 'Mirage/ " 

Men would be great in their completeness. 
They abhor being fractional, but, like David, 
they desire to walk in their integrity. In 
experience, in knowledge, in power, they must 
beat out the full music of their possibilities. 
They would be four-square men and tall, 
walking, sun-crowned, among the mysteries. 
This accomplishment is their Holy Grail and 
will lead them away from the foolish fears 
and the narrow outlooks and the low levels 
of a petty life up to the highlands of immor- 
tality and brotherhood and God. But let 
them not hope to see the rose-red beating of 
the cup unveiled unless first they choose to 
sit in the Siege Perilous, where men lose 
themselves to save themselves, and then 
steadily determine to dare all things until 
they come to the end of their quest. 



II 

LIFE AND THE BOOK 

Witnesses come thronging from every 
comer of the intellectual universe to say each 
his word for the essential truth of the Bible. 
Some come from the halls of history, some 
emerge from the caverns of archaeology, some 
enter in stately fashion from that Field of the 
Cloth of Gold which we call literature, some 
appear from the stern court of ethics. All bear 
testimony of worth and of significance. But 
one witness olBFers evidence so conclusive, so 
practical, so ready to the test of every man, 
that the whole case might rest upon his word. 
He comes from the common roads of every 
day, and his only word is this: The Bible fits 
the needs of men and its music harmonizes 
with all the tones of life as men must live it. 
Be his music to-day loud or low, stern as 
justice or tender as gentle mercy, glad with 
trumpeting majors or sad with sobbing 
minors, every man will find that the messages 
of the Book, like great organ pipes, will give 
it a volume and a solemn beauty beyond any 

25 



26 THE MASTER QUEST 

power of his own poor, thin Hfe. The Book 
must be true because it so marvelously suits 
life for the accompHshment of its obvious 
purpose, the bringing of men and nations to 
rehgious and ethical completeness. The 
Book reveals what life seeks; the Book prom- 
ises what life demands; the Book commands 
what life requires; the Book and life are 
ever crying, one to the other, ''Yea and 
Amen/' 

Man is the questioning animal. Other 
animals are satisfied if within their reach 
there is sufficient provision for food and drink 
and rest. But man, having these, must 
still whip all the streams of the universe with 
his hooked question mark. Much knowledge 
he finds elsewhere, but only the Book can 
satisfy his most instinctive, intense, and far- 
reaching inquiries. "What of this strange 
Somewhat outside myself too vast for defini- 
tion.^" The Bible makes answer: "In the 
beginning, God.'" The word dominates the 
whole Book until it looms into a Person so 
sublime that we uncover our heads in awe 
before him, so holy that we worship at his 
feet, so kind that we call him "Our Father." 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 27 

The man asks, "What am I and how came I 
to be?" The Book makes reply: "And the 
Lord God formed man of the dust of the 
ground, and breathed into his nostrils the 
breath of life; and man became a living soul." 
This august statement of the initial mingling 
of flesh and spirit leaves much of method un- 
explained, but is very wonderful in its revela- 
tion of fact and cause. Again he asks, 
"What is the voice that gives definition to the 
ideas of right and wrong and that makes such 
startling distinction between them?" "And 
God said, Thou shalt'— Thou shalt not.' " 
Beside the naked simplicity and might of this 
utterance, all other explanations of the funda- 
mental moral consciousness seem labored and 
inconclusive. Amidst his hopes and fears, 
man lifts up his voice in Job's question, "If 
a man die, shall he live again?" How appro- 
priate to man is the answer and what a 
sublime prophecy it holds! — "Then shall the 
dust return to the earth as it was: and the 
spirit shall return unto God who gave it." 

In man's heart will be heard the stern 
word, "What is the supreme dut3^'^" The 
Book is ready with the reply both in the old 



28 THE MASTER QUEST 

law and in the new covenant, ''Thou shalt 
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and 
all thy soul, and all thy mind. . . . Thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. ... On 
these two commandments hang all the law 
and the prophets." Can any think of an 
ideal more perfectly centered at the heart of 
life and more inclusive in its outworking.'^ 
Finally comes that very urgent cry from the 
one who realizes how far his halting life walks 
behind his winged ideals, "What shall I do to 
be saved from my guilt and from my bondage 
to sin.^" The glad tidings are in the Book, 
and there alone. "In due time Christ died 
for the ungodly." "The law of the Spirit of 
life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the 
law of sin and death." 

What can we call such a fountain of satis- 
fying knowledge save "The Book".^ By the 
depth and sweep of its message, by its 
blessed influence upon the thought and con- 
science of the man who knows it, by its trans- 
forming power in those nations that will 
observe its teachings, it justifies its title. 
Men are endlessly varied in their habitations, 
in their political and social environments, in 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 29 

their training and ideals, in their heredity and 
in their possibihties, but to them all the Book 
comes with universal, age-long, satisfying 
message. It is not my Book or your Book; 
it belongs neither to the Hebrew culture nor 
to the Greek nor to the Anglo-Saxon. It is 
the world's Book and belongs to all ages. 

Quite contrary to first appearance, there is 
really little of the ancient atmosphere of an- 
nals or folklore about the Bible. Essentially, 
it does not transport us on a magic carpet 
into other worlds or to distant centuries. It is 
intensely terrestrial and thoroughly modern. 
The Bible has been called a long picture gal- 
lery in which hang the portraits of men and 
the panorama of history all lighted by the con- 
stant presence of God. The artists are deep- 
seeing and eminently fair; no wart is painted 
out or softened into less disfigurement. The 
sturdy self-mastery and reverent magnanim- 
ity of David, the nation's hero, are no more 
prominent in his picture than are his slavery 
to a sudden passion and the cowardly mean- 
ness by which he would cover his adultery 
with murder. 

But here is a very unique quality of the 



30 THE MASTER QUEST 

Book. As we look at these pictures of men 
long dead and of nations whose glories are all 
written, we feel more and more insistently 
that here are our own portraits. Our lives 
and characters and the current history of our 
own people look back at us from the pages of 
this wonderful volume. We read the story 
of a man who walked the dusty roads of 
Palestine in the days of Christ, and behold! 
it is the tale of one who treads the streets of 
our own city in this year of our Lord. We 
study the chronicles of Israel and the state- 
craft of the prophets and discover the history 
of our native land. The Word of God is the 
very latest news. The successes and the fail- 
ures, the hopes and the fears, the glory and 
the shame of the patriarchs and the prophets, 
of the apostles and the Pharisees, of Barti- 
mseus and Pilate, belong to our own time and 
country and selves. This is because the vital 
facts of the Bible are basic in life, then and 
now, here and there and everywhere. 

There is an unusual agreement between 
life and the Book in what each has to say 
about those very prominent matters, sin, 
atonement and faith. Other facts are held 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 31 

important in both, but these are preeminent; 
other things are emphasized here and there, 
but these three stand forth everywhere. The 
black thread of sin, the scarlet thread of 
vicarious suflFering, the blue thread of faith 
mingle with the white and the red and the 
gold of purity and love and glory in every 
pattern of the Book and of life. 

Sin is a bitter and, often, a brutal fact. 
However we may insist that it is the necessary 
coordinate of a conscious free will, or that it 
is the inevitable by-product of an achieved 
holiness, or that it is the indispensable back- 
ground against which the glory of the grace of 
God is magnified, the fact itself remains hate- 
ful to men and loathsome in the sight of God. 
And to our shame it is everywhere present. 

The Book, from Genesis to Revelation, is 
permeated with it. It forms the dregs of 
many a brilliant life, the black background 
of many a fair picture. In its uncontrolled 
blaze, Cain slew his brother. In the first 
song of the Book, Lamech wails his dread of 
punishment for the killing of a young man. 
Before the Flood came, sin had spread 
through the world like a forest fire, leaving 



82 THE MASTEK QUEST 

only the ashes of nobility. Abraham, the 
father of the faithful, was stained with sin; 
Jacob must wrestle with an angel and be 
crippled before he can be freed from the mean- 
ness of his young manhood. Moses, leader 
of the chosen people, found himself shut 
out of the promised land by sin. The nation 
that was great enough of soul to be the 
channel through which God could flow into 
the world, in spite of prophets and punish- 
ments, sinned ever more and more. And 
because they were stiff-necked and proud and 
blinded by sin they at last knew not the day 
of visitation and slew the long-expected 
Anointed One. 

The expression of sin is never absent from 
the biography and the letters and the history 
of the New Testament. It seems to find its 
culmination in the terrible vision and con- 
demnations of the Isle of Patmos. Of these 
the most terrible is not the lake of fire, but 
that other quiet word of despair which reveals 
character and destiny so fixed in sin as to be 
forever beyond even God's power of redemp- 
tion: "Let him that is filthy be filthy still." 

We may blink the fact of sin, if we will, or 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 33 

excuse it or call it by euphemistic names, but 
the Bible does not wink at it nor explain 
away its culpability nor disguise it in a 
drapery of words. 

It is as mean as Jacob's lie to his blind 
father, as foolish as Belshazzar's drunkenness, 
as loathsome as Uzziah's leprosy, as treach- 
erous as Judas's betrayal of his Master, as 
unnatural as Cain's murder of his brother, as 
heartless as Herod's slaughter of the inno- 
cents, as bitter as Saul's despair. Sin de- 
stroys like a forest fire, seizing upon grandeur 
and beauty and leaving behind only ashes 
and the blackness of desolation. And sin 
will destroy until the triumph of the Christ 
is complete and the kingdom of God is fully 
estabhshed upon the earth. This is the con- 
stant message of the Book. 

But in these words about sin the Bible 
does not bring any new message. It merely 
holds the mirror before the face of the shamed 
world. The fact of sin is obvious. Every 
law on the statute books is an acknowledg- 
ment of sin; every police officer is a confession 
of sin. Our almshouses, our hospitals, our 
insane asylums crowded with the direct 



34 THE MASTER QUEST 

or indirect tragedies of sin, cry without ceas- 
ing, ''Have mercy upon us, O God, and blot 
out our transgressions/' Our penitentiaries, 
our palaces of gilded vice, our luxurious 
plutocracy of the boulevard, our festering 
poverty of the alley, are damning proofs of 
social sins greater than those that drew the 
bitter mockery of Isaiah and the lightning of 
Amos. In spite of the gilding of its uniforms 
and the diabolic sublimity of its massive 
machinery, notwithstanding the sacrificial 
bravery in the trenches and the tender pity 
in hospitals filled with its bloody wreckage, 
war is wholesale murder, and makes the earth 
to reek with the stench of its slaughter* 

So universal is sin that the man who would 
claim that he had never sinned would be 
greeted with laughter. We expect a certain sad 
distance between our ideals and our moral 
achievements. The reckless demands of the 
flesh, the dragging tentacles of custom, the 
aberrations of an unbalanced or wrongly 
centered life, so hinder our upward climb that 
we count it a notable victory for a man to will 
steadfastly the best he knows. Sin is so great 
a matter in our thought that, having once 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 35 

touched it, the stain will cling to our hands. 
Shakespeare never painted the soul more 
truly than when he showed Lady Macbeth 
trying in bitterness of heart and without 
avail to cleanse her hands from the red spot 
of Duncan's blood. We are sure that our 
sins will find us out, either here or hereafter, 
transformed into judgments. 

We do not believe the utterances of the 
Bible about sin because they are found upon 
the sacred pages, but, rather, we accept the 
Book because we find such words there. As 
we read them thoughtfully we leap to the 
sudden discovery that they are just what we 
expected to find in a Book making such 
claims of truth. Had all mention of sin been 
omitted, or had it and its consequences been 
minimized, then, straightway, we would have 
refused the Bible our confidence. But now we 
deeply believe because, in bitter, shamed ac- 
knowledgment of sin, the Book and life agree. 

The second great emphasis in the Bible and 
in life falls on the atonement for sin through 
vicarious suffering. Li the Book, against the 
black background of sin shines the crimson 



36 THE MASTER QUEST 

agony and the golden glory of the cross. 
Calvary is the climax of the Scriptures, the 
dominating peak of all God's dealings with 
men. Sin puts the blackness of shame into 
the Book, and, if the cross were left out, every 
chapter would be hung with the crepe of 
despair. But with manifold reiteration the 
shedding of blood is set forth as the way of 
redemption, the cure of souls. The sacrifice 
that Abel offered, the altar that Abraham 
built, the solemn rites of the tabernacle, and 
the stately ceremonies of the temple set forth 
the heart of a vicarious atonement. The 
prophets emphasize the worth of sacrifices by 
rebuking those who would bring them to the 
altar in merely formal fashion, without true 
repentance and reformation. Isaiah, as a 
messenger of Jehovah, cried out, "Bring no 
more vain oblations; incense is an abomina- 
tion unto me — your hands are full of blood.'' 
Acceptable offerings defiled by the unclean 
hands that bore them to the altar, because of 
their deep symbolic sacredness, became all 
the more sacrilegious. The shame of their 
defilement was all the greater for the holy 
significance with which they were laden. 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 37 

The shadow of the atoning cross deepens 
as we come to the gospel of Isaiah, where 
there is revealed a tragic night of suffering and 
shame and glory and hope all mingled. And 
all concerns the One who died for us. 

''But he was wounded for our transgres- 
sions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the 
chastisement of our peace was upon him; 
and with his stripes we are healed. All we 
like sheep have gone astray; we have turned 
every one to his own way; and the Lord hath 
laid on him the iniquity of us all." 

From the moment that Simeon in the tem- 
ple uttered those prophetic words to Mary, 
"And a sword shall pierce through thine own 
heart also," Calvary dominated the story of 
Jesus 's hfe. The hurried flight into Egypt, 
the slaying of Bethlehem's babes, the fear of 
Joseph, the passing from quiet Nazareth to 
the banks of the Jordan, so typical of the 
turmoil into which he thus entered, the vigil 
in the Wilderness, where the Man put his 
feet dehberately into the way that had the 
cross at the end — all these lay under the 
shadow of Golgotha. 

One quaint sentence from the pen of the 



38 THE MASTER QUEST 

evangelist sings like a bowstring with the 
tenseness of the situation. Before the Master 
lay Jerusalem, where his enemies, goaded to 
fury by the uncompromising word he spoke, 
planned with implacable hatred and cunning 
strength to compass his death. He and his 
disciples well knew the danger, but "He set 
his face to go to Jerusalem.'' His biographer, 
not so much in the statement as in the 
phrasing, revealed all the allurement of the 
quiet hills of Nazareth, all the dread of the 
physical suffering and of the open ignominy 
abiding his entrance into the city, and told 
the matchless constancy that drew him on. 
Moreover, there appears plainly in the stress 
of that hour the moral necessity of the cross 
by which men should be reconciled to God. 

In the brief biblical history of the church 
we find its faith gathered around the vicarious 
death as justified and glorified in the tri- 
umphant resurrection. The messengers of 
the new faith proclaimed everywhere the 
forgiveness of sins through the atoning death 
of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God. The 
apostolic epistles in theologies, warnings, 
exhortations and encouragements, discover 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 39 

the same cross continually lifted up as the 
visible sign of salvation. Evangelist and 
apostle of the New Covenant agree with 
patriarch and prophet of the Old Covenant 
in the measureless meaning and power of the 
vicarious atonement. The two Covenants 
are not separate in this their greatest message, 
for John the Baptist, the noblest of the older 
prophetic order and forerunner of the Christ, 
uttered the unifying word, "Behold the Lamb 
of God, which taketh away the sin of the 
world.'' The other John, after a long life 
of Christian experience, echoed the cry of 
the preacher of repentance, "The Lamb slain 
from the foundation of the world." Men 
who accept the Book cannot refrain from 
singing, 

"In the cross of Christ I glory. 
Towering o'er the wrecks of time; 

All the light of sacred story- 
Gathers round its head sublime/* 

The way of God's grace from the beginning 
of man's sin until the redemption never runs 
out of sight of "the green hill that stands 
without the city gate." 

The agreement between the word of the 



40 THE MASTER QUEST 

Book concerning the vicarious atonement 
and the general thought of men is not so 
obvious as in the matter of sin, but is none the 
less real and complete. In the interest of 
perfect fairness, the verdict must be rendered 
by two juries, the one Christian and the other 
non-Christian. What is the place of the 
atonement in the Christian consciousness, and 
what place is given to its fundamental ele- 
ments in the common, unreUgious thought of 
the world .^ If these verdicts agree, who can 
deny their correctness.^ 

It is very evident that the answer made by 
Christian people in this matter will be more 
explicit and more authoritative. For if the 
most able judges of literature are literary 
people, and if the best judges of science are 
scientific men, and if the highest judges of 
music are musical folks, then, certainly, 
those who by aptitude and training and ex- 
perience are religious will be most sure to 
express clear and accurate opinions about 
religious matters. It is no more than the 
simplest common sense to ask seriously of 
believers in Jesus Christ, *'What do you 
think, how do you feel, what do you do about 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 41 

the cross of Calvary and its august and 
lovable Burden?" 

Ruskin has said concerning certain Greek 
fables that on the surface they are so intol- 
erably false that it becomes necessary to look 
deeper for their treasure of truth. The tale 
was but a husk to be stripped off from the 
kernel of rich significance. But the intellect- 
ual response of the church to the story of 
Calvary is not the search for the lesson of a 
fable, but for the philosophy of a fact. Since 
Paul wrote his letter to the httle church at 
Rome, an epistle deeper freighted and des- 
tined for a longer voyage than either writer 
or readers dreamed. Christian thinkers have 
been trying to set forth in the terms of their 
own generations an explanation of the death 
of Christ as something more significant than 
a martyrdom. They have called it the atone- 
ment that should bridge the chasm between a 
God of consuming holiness and yearning love 
and a man leprous with his sin. The unique 
fact itself has gripped the church without 
argument. Men do not use a microphone 
to hear thunder, nor a reading glass to see a 
sunset, nor a syllogism to discover their Sin- 



42 THE MASTER QUEST 

Bearer. These, being such notable facts, 
thrust themselves upon the attention and 
ask, not proof, but explanation. 

So theories of the atonement have been 
multiplied. Some are fantastic indeed. Some 
are monuments of genius. All show how 
impossible it is to spell out the thoughts of 
God in our meager alphabets. But each is 
significant in that it reveals the imperial com- 
pulsion of a fact driving the most profound 
thinkers to its explanation. From the day 
in which John, the stern prophet of repent- 
ance, said the word beyond his own under- 
standing, "Behold, the Lamb of God,'' the 
intellect of the church has agreed in seeing in 
the cross the way of reconciliation. 

The unstudied emotion is an even truer 
index of real thought than the formal utter- 
ance of opinions. The heart of the church 
in three impressive ways tells out its accept- 
ance of a real atonement in the death 
of its Lord. The rite which is the vital 
center of Roman Catholic worship, which is 
given most reverence in Protestant cere- 
monies, which touches the heart of the 
church universal most profoundly, is the 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 43 

Eucharist, that tender memorial of Jesus and 
full-hearted confession of faith in his atoning 
death. 

The hymns, the prayers, the testimonies, 
and the devotional literature of the church 
are all dominated by the constant presence 
of the agony and the glory of the cross. And 
these express the common emotion of the 
brotherhood of Jesus's disciples. The Chris- 
tian community has taken an ignominious 
instrument of criminal death and has trans- 
formed it in painting and sculpture and 
architecture and music and hterature and 
honor into the symbol of all that is best in our 
ideals. Les Miserables, with its transfiguring 
grace, in literature; Rubens's "Descent from 
the Cross'' in art; Handel's wonderful ora- 
torio, the "Messiah," in music; the Gothic 
church with its nave and its transepts, in 
architecture; the Iron Cross of valor and the 
Red Cross of mercy, are only instances of the 
far-shining glory that Christ gave the world 
with his life on the bitter tree. 

"I should hate the knife that murdered my 
friend," said a thoughtful pagan. "Why do 
you Christians love the cross.^" "Because it 



44 THE MASTER QUEST 

means to us/' was the reply, "so much more 
than the murder of our Friend." Its hate- 
fulness as the means of his death is lost in 
love and adoration as we see upon it the 
revelation of God's grace and of our salvation. 
The heart of the church exalts the cross 
because it cannot deny the atonement. 

Nor is the will of the church behind its 
intellect and heart in its confession of this 
sturdy faith. The cross is the mighty 
dynamic of the Christian movement. "For 
the Man who died for us'' is the rallying cry 
of the church. Paul felt it a privilege to enter 
into the fellowship of his sufferings; the 
martyr host counted themselves happy in 
dying for him; missionaries go forth to face 
ridicule and hatred and persecution and to 
besiege irresponsive hearts with long patience 
because they know they are following in his 
steps. The contagion of brotherhood, in 
which lies the only hope that the civilization 
of Christendom will last longer than that 
of Babylon or Egypt, flows from the "Inas- 
much" that identifies the Master with the 
least of his brothers in need. He is but a 
novice in the study of Christian psychology 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 45 

who does not know that the forceful center of 
all these movements lies in the revelation of 
redeeming love nailed on the cross and in the 
new life that blossoms on the hill of death. 
By this response of the Christian intellect, 
heart and will to the death of their Lord, 
his disciples are placing over against their 
acknowledgment of sin the equally accepted 
fact of the atonement. 

However, consideration should be given to 
any possible aberration in the judgment of the 
church owing to predisposition of education 
or desire. Corroboration from the opinion 
of the unreligious makes the conclusion 
doubly sure. Not that they have given 
much thought to the doctrine as such, but 
they have thought about the essential ele- 
ments of the atonement as wrought into their 
daily lives. And the value and necessity of 
these they recognize. 

The scientific mind demands that every 
result shall be attributed to an adequate 
cause. If a man who has sinned through 
many years is to be drawn from beneath the 
sword of inexorable justice, if he is to be hfted 
from the quicksands of accumulated evil 



40 THE MASTER QUEST 

forces and transformed from a doer and lover 
of wrong into a doer and lover of right, if he 
is to be enlarged into greatness of vision and 
purpose and achievement, somewhere in the 
process there must enter a power equal to the 
mighty consequence. If the sewage of vile- 
ness is to be drawn from the streets of society, 
if the swamps of human selfishness are to be 
drained, if the fallow ground of indifference 
to the common welfare is to be broken up 
into gardens of brotherhood, if the nations 
of the world are to become the kingdom of 
God, there must enter into the whole social 
movement a force of vast goodness and 
vitality. The measure of the result is 
beyond calculation; the magnitude of the 
cause can be no less. 

The unfortunate end of a life as perfect, 
even, as that of Jesus would hardly meet this 
need. The fellowship of martyrs is exceeding 
wide. But if that death be a revelation of 
God's great love, if it be an infinite tragedy 
into which every man's sin is wrought and an 
altar of expiation for the guilt of each, if it 
be an inexhaustible fountain of cleansing for 
sin-stained souls, then it will become an 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 47 

adequate cause for the far-reaching, pro- 
found, and mighty power of the glad tidings 
about salvation. If this be true, it will not 
seem strange that here the midnight of sinful 
despair is changed on a sudden into the dewy 
morning of purity and hope; that here a life 
mired in vice catches a strange word and, by 
the power in it, leaps and runs along the paths 
of righteousness; that here a common man 
sees a star and follows the gleam forever in 
the knightliness of Galahad. We expect 
such a power to expand on all sides into 
institutions of helpfulness and into ideals 
that might have saved the culture of Greece 
and the grandeur of Rome. We will think 
it no more than natural, in such a case, that 
Christ shall stamp his name upon the civili- 
zation in which his story is told and weave 
his personality into its very fabric. In its 
literature and in its laws, in its music and its 
painting, in its merchandising and its 
patriotism, in its industry and its idleness, in 
its houses of government and in the homes of 
its people, we will look for the name and the 
words and the spirit of the Crucified. And 
all this Jesus Christ from his sacrificial throne 



48 THE MASTER QUEST 



on Calvary has done. Is it not, then, more 
than a martyrdom? Is it less than an ade- 
quate atonement? 

But the atonement is more than an ade- 
quate cause. The Passion of our Lord is for 
others, and in that vicarious quahty it comes 
very close to our common life. Unrewarded 
labor and suffering are wrought into the 
warp and woof of our most ordinary life. 
The men who sweat in the breath of molten 
metal, who toil in the dust-laden air where 
the spindles whirr and the looms rattle, who 
bear the hardship and dare the dangers of the 
clanging train, can never be repaid in money 
for the sacrifices they make for us nor for the 
benefits they confer upon us. Nor do they 
stand alone in their vicarious lives. Whatever 
is worth the doing costs labor and sacrifice, 
and we are all reapers in the fields of others. 

All along the way the race has come are 
crosses upon which the blind generations have 
nailed their prophets. The teaching of every 
new truth, the gaining of every new liberty, 
the achievement of every greater ideal has 
been at the price of vicarious agony. Every 
worker must bear a burden not his own. 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 49 

Every one who lives for a cause must forsake 
ease and accept contumely, if not persecution. 
The sins of the guilty fall in heavy conse- 
quences upon the innocent. Those who 
follow in Jesus' steps of service must bear 
daily crosses. The common life is full of 
vicarious suffering. 

The strongest restraint from sin and the 
strongest incentive to well-doing lie in the 
vivid knowledge of this vicarious fact. If 
the certainty that his sin involves the inno- 
cent in suffering does not keep a man from 
sin, nothing will. If the knowledge that 
what he holds most precious in life was paid 
for by others in the coin of pain does not 
inspire him to righteousness, he is hopelessly 
dull of heart. If anything can finally win 
the world into discipleship unto its saving, 
it is some matchless deed of unselfish pain. 

In what perfect harmony with the common 
ways of life is the vicarious death of Jesus! 
How natural is the gospel of Isaiah, "He was 
wounded for our transgressions, he was 
bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement 
of our peace was upon him; and by his stripes 
we are healed." When such a vicarious deed 



50 THE MASTER QUEST 

has in it the sublime content of Calvary's 
tragedy, it becomes irresistible in its winsome 
power over men who are accustomed to suffer 
one for another. 

There is a third element in both the atone- 
ment and life that has bulked very large in 
these later, wiser years. Jesus saw, as we 
are beginning to see, the measureless worth 
and the supreme power of the individual. 
The greatest fact in the world is a man. All 
else is but so much raw material for his 
shaping, so many forces for his direction. He 
is the ultimate reason in the natural order, 
the highest peak in the revealed purposes of 
God. The dominant personalism of phil- 
osophy, the warm humanity of art, the con- 
ceded right of the humblest worker to live, 
the tender care of the permanently incom- 
petent in philanthropy, the democratic em- 
phasis in statecraft, the basic horror of war, 
hero-worship everywhere, bear convincing 
testimony to the royal privilege and the im- 
perial authority of the individual. 

Of two things about religion the thoughtful 
world is sure: whatever salvation comes to a 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 51 

man must come to him as he stands alone; 
it must also come through the mediation of 
another. The whole infinitely varied world 
means nothing to us save as each interprets it 
into the terms of his own personality. Yet it 
would all be a Sahara of insignificance were 
it not that life is ever touching Hfe. Enoch 
Arden's little ocean-girt kingdom was strong 
in shelter, burdened with plenty, adorned 
with beauty, but its shipwrecked ruler dwelt 
alone. He is typical of every man as he sat 
seeing nothing of the splendor of the day's 
march across the world, hearing nothing of 
the royal shouting of the league-long rollers 
on the sand, only seeking with a hunger that 
sharpened into madness for a sail. 

"And glories of the broad belt of the world- 
All these he saw; but what he fain had seen 
He could not see, the kindly human face. 
Nor ever hear a kindly voice. . . , 

But every day 
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts 
Among the palms and ferns and precipices; 
The blaze upon the waters to the east; 
The blaze upon the island overhead; 
The blaze upon the waters to the west; 
Then the great stars that globed themselves in heaven. 
The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again 
The scarlet shafts of sunrise — but no sail.'* 



52 THE MASTER QUEST 



Whatever this gorgeous pageant meant to 
Enoch Arden must be translated into terms 
of his own self; but, at the best, it did not 
mean enough to make life tolerable or sanity 
possible without ''the kindly human face." 

Is it not absolutely clear, then, that if men 
would see the ideal worthiness, they must 
find it expressed in a person; if they would 
see vividly the consequences of sin, they must 
see them made concrete in the life of a person; 
if they would find love and mercy, they must 
find them in a face that looks compassion- 
ately into their own; if there is any healing 
for the disease of their sin, any sufiicient 
power for the reshaping of their characters 
into symmetry, that remedy and that dyna- 
mic must be found in a person great enough 
and near enough and loving enough to do the 
moral miracle? And such a Person is the 
stainless, strong, and compassionate Christ. 
There is an obvious agreement between the 
fact and the promised power of the atone- 
ment as revealed in the Book, on the one 
hand, and the acceptance of this way of sal- 
vation by the church and of its essential ele- 
ments by the unreligious world on the other. 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 53 

There is yet in this agreement the third 
fact of faith, which hnks the experience of 
sin and the fact of the atonement into a 
personal redemption. This fact, Hke the 
ether that brings to us the hght of the sun, is 
the medium by which the glory of the Shin- 
ing One enters into our Kves. In it two ele- 
ments, trust and loyalty, constantly react 
and the resultant is mighty to enrich and to 
accomplish. 

The Bible is full of faith. That man's 
faith in God is everywhere revealed in the 
Book is saying what is trite. Perhaps it is not 
so clearly seen that the sacred pages also 
discover the profounder glow of God's faith 
in man. He has trusted men so much, and 
they have so often failed him, that the Bible 
might well be called the Book of God's Dis- 
appointments. Men frequently deceived be- 
come cynical and cease to believe in anyone. 
But God keeps right on trusting folks. He 
trusted Adam and was disappointed, but 
Enoch proved faithful. Abraham could be 
depended upon, though Jacob for many 
years was so unreliable that, when he became 
trustworthy, God changed his name. Moses 



54 THE MASTER QUEST 

did very well in keeping faith, but the people 
he led proved foolishly and wickedly untrue. 
There is an honor-roll of prophets, but the 
record of the kings is, for the most part, a 
roll of dishonor. Under the weight of respon- 
sibility and opportunity they broke like 
weak staves. Even the greatest of them, in 
spite of high promise and much worthy 
achievement, fell into most grievous sin. John 
and Paul were true to the last, but Peter 
failed partly and Judas utterly. Jesus tried 
to hold the betrayer by the bonds of con- 
fidence. He called him to be one of the 
twelve. He made him treasurer of the com- 
pany; he revealed his plans to him, brought 
him into the upper room and made known to 
him the garden of the agony. How bitter 
must have been the disappointment when 
Judas went out wilKuUy and blindly into the 
night ! And shame is ours when we remember 
how sadly numerous a company has walked 
in the footsteps of Iscariot. Yet, in spite of 
all, he trusts us still. "God remaineth 
faithful. He cannot deny himself." Faithful 
has he been to selfish Lot and deceitful Jacob 
and passion-ridden David and despairing 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 55 

Saul and cowardly Peter and to generations 
of their like. And though these have failed 
hini in part or altogether still he puts in men's 
hands matters that have in them the dimen- 
sions of eternity. Shall we not, then, call 
the record of all this faith in man the Book 
of God's Confidence.'^ 

Nor is this story of trust peculiar to the 
Bible. Wherever man touches the world the 
same tale is told in letters of life. Here 
stands the naked man unknowing and needy 
on the face of the wealthy earth. But God 
obviously expects him to discover for himself 
and to fashion for his need the riches beneath 
his feet. Ten thousand forces rush past the 
man along the clanging rails of law. God 
expects this man to be a self-taught engineer 
handling the reverse lever, opening and 
closing the throttle, and choosing the switches 
as he will. Universes of mystery crowd upon 
this thinking one. God challenges him to 
ask questions. But when he picks up the 
gauntlet and hurls out his Whats and his 
Whys, the Omniscient smiles with fatherly 
pride and makes reply: 'Tind out, my son, 
for yourself. You can do it." Through all 



56 THE MASTER QUEST 

there is the mighty pressure of the moral im- 
perative, "I ought.'^ But when the man 
cries, "What ought I?" the Most Righteous 
lays on him the high trust of working out 
that problem for himself. Incidentally, since 
God is so agelessly patient in the whole moral 
process, we, who are so irritably in haste to 
bring to perfectness some moral particular 
the instant we get the vision, may well profit 
by the divine example. "But what of the 
commandments.^ What of the Revelation of 
man's duty.^^" Only this: seeing truth is 
quite as necessary as revealing truth. If the 
latter is God's part in the moral problem, the 
former as certainly belongs to man. That 
God should speak a word to men is wonderful, 
no doubt, but it is more marvelous that he 
should expect them to understand that Word. 
How vastly he trusts them ! 

But man is not content to be good. He 
must see God. This is axiomatic to those 
who know life at all. In the freshness of the 
morning, when we enthusiastically hammer 
out the day's purposes and in the cool of 
the evening, when we calmly measure the 
day's deeds, God walks in the gardens of life 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 57 

and invites the souls of men. In the answers 
they make are hidden their destinies. But 
God will not drive them from the best of 
free choice into the miserable second best of 
compulsion. He will not forsake his confi- 
dence nor cease to expect the highest of men. 
His commandments are reasonings, his warn- 
ings are persuasions. 

Enoch came and walked with God, and the 
gates of his soul were lifted up and the King 
of glory came sweeping in. Adam went and 
hid himself and fell upon the stony ways of a 
man who has despised his opportunity. Each 
ancient is but the van-leader of a long pro- 
cession. However a man conceive the Divine, 
he is deeply conscious that his higher relations 
to his God are not of outer necessity but of 
inner choice. He is fundamentally free, for 
a genuine confidence rests in him. 

But man's faith toward God receives an 
equal emphasis in the Book. Abraham, who 
believed God so that it was accounted unto 
him for righteousness, Elisha, who discovered 
to his fearful servant the surrounding chariots 
of the Almighty, Isaiah, who in the din of 
marching armies continually urged the king 



58 THE MASTER QUEST 

to turn from Egypt and Assyria to Jehovah 
of Hosts, are but a few of those whose trust 
and loyalty emblazon Holy Writ with words 
and deeds that laid hold on the reality within 
the veil. 

The Old Covenant never runs far from its 
central theme of faith and the New Covenant 
in Jesus Christ may well be called the Book 
of Faith. At the very gateway of the new 
life it reveals, stands the word of faith, ''He 
that believeth on the Son hath everlasting 
life." Faith is the Alpha in the knowledge 
of its truth: ''While ye have the light, believe 
in the light, that ye may be children of 
light." The validity of all its promises de- 
pends upon a constant faith: "Ask, and it 
shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; 
knock, and it shall be opened unto you." 
When the Master looked far down the cen- 
turies the question that throbbed in his 
heart concerned faith: "When the Son of 
man cometh, shall he find faith on the 
earth.^" The apostles in teaching and in 
life repeated and exemplified the word of the 
Master and, doubtless, the farewell of each 
of these brave men may be found in the 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 59 

splendid valedictory of Paul, "I have kept 
the faith." 

Nor is faith peculiar to religion or to the 
Bible. Never a farmer sows a seed, but he 
makes the act a confession of faith; never a 
smith hammers the glowing metal, but he 
manifests a trust in its stability and a loy- 
alty to its laws; never an electrician closes a 
switch, but he reveals an abundant and un- 
shaken faith in a vast power that he cannot 
even define. The natural scientist, holding, 
it may be, a bit of contempt for the mysteries 
of religion that must be accepted undemon- 
strated, builds his science upon the evidence 
of his own poor senses, the unproven uniform- 
ity of law and the incomprehensible rela- 
tions of the outer fact to the inner thought 
he thinks by faith. 

The confidence between merchant and 
customer, physician and patient, teacher and 
pupil, husband and wife, parent and child, 
friend and friend, suggests how large a place 
on the web of common life is given to the 
threads of faith. It might, indeed, be 
named the warp of life, for without it the 
whole social fabric would fall in pieces. Or 



60 THE MASTEK QUEST 

it might be called the silk with which the 
embroidery of life is wrought, for without it 
our days would be dull and barren beyond 
endurance. Both the strength and the 
beauty of life depend upon the constant in- 
terweaving of the threads of a common faith. 
What blessings lie within the wider hori- 
zons of faith ! If we trusted each other com- 
pletely and were perfect in our mutual loy- 
alty, this old, sad world would become of a 
sudden a very suburb of paradise. Strifes, 
military, industrial, and domestic, would 
cease. None would be enervated by vicious 
luxury and no one would be in want. Lives 
rich in talent would be freed from fetters of 
economic circumstances and would be given, 
opportunity to blossom and bear fruit for 
the enrichment of the world. Mighty ac- 
complishments would be possible when it 
was no longer necessary to guard against 
each other's selfishness, and when in com- 
plete security we could unite our strength 
for the larger deed. Disasters would come, 
for some are unavoidable, but, even in such 
case, the quick sympathy of all for those 
who are stricken would somewhat compensate 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 61 

for any loss. Macaulay's dream of the past 
would become the blessed fact of the future: 

"And all men were like brothers 
In the brave days of old." 

If any think the vision is too rosy, lying 
beyond the strength of our limping intellects, 
he will at least agree that with such a faith 
we would go far toward the goal, and ever 
farther, for the best helpmate the mind ever 
had is the willing heart. The way, the com- 
mon unreligious way, out of blunders into 
truth, out of weakness into strength, out of 
sin into righteousness, is the path of faith. 
To trust our ideals and our friends and to 
be loyal to them, is to climb into the high- 
lands of the larger vision and the truer life. 
In a sense quite apart from religion, men are 
saved by faith. And the faith of the Bible 
is simply this common faith glorified by the 
inclusion within its vital sweep of God, our 
Father, and Jesus Christ, our Elder Brother. 
And so the Book and life again agree. 

Sin, Faith, and Atonement, the three great 
words of the Bible, are dominant in life. Nor 
need the reason be far sought. The glorious 



()2 THE MASTER QUEST 

presence of God in the Book does not in any 
sense crowd out the equal presence of man. 
It is the Book of Man as truly as it is the Book 
of God, for there God and man meet. Com- 
mon life flows through the Book around the 
feet of God, and from the Book surge out 
into life the tides of the Most High. And it 
is ever true that God is initially present in 
life. The singer of Israel declares that neither 
desert nor death can give a hiding place from 
him, for wherever he might turn "Behold, he 
is there." Coming close to Nature is draw- 
ing near to God. How sweetly Longfellow 
sings of the simple-minded Agassiz ! 

"And Nature, the old nurse, took 
The child upon her knee. 
Saying: *Here is a storybook 

Thy Father hath written for thee.' 

** *Come wander with me!' she said, 
*Into regions yet untrod. 
And read what is still unread 
In the manuscripts of God.' " 

In the Book and in the Manuscript the 
same great words are emphasized, but with 
this difference: in life we see these massive 
facts confusedly, dimly, distorted by the 



LIFE AND THE BOOK 63 

aberration of self-interest. In the Bible they 
are lifted out of the dust of every day into 
a place of clear quiet. There, if we will, we 
can see them somewhat clearly as God 
measures and relates them. So the Word of 
God interprets life and defines and enforces 
its words. 

It is true that in their measure of the great 
words of which we have been thinking the 
Book and life agree. But it is more pro- 
foundly true that these two are identical. 
For God is as present in the events of to-day 
as when he spoke to Moses in the bush; he 
is speaking through men to-day as prophetic 
in their mission as was Amos; his voice is 
ringing in the endlessly varied tones of 
modem Ufe; God crowds upon us. If we will 
open any door of faith, behold, the King of 
Glory will come in and cast out sin through 
the atonement of the Crucified One. So this 
threefold agreement will become concrete in 
each life. 



Ill 

THE MIRACULOUS PERSON 

Above all, Christianity is the religion of a 
Person. Sometimes we forget this most ob- 
vious fact and come to think it consists of 
Articles of Religion, of Longer or Shorter 
Catechisms, of Confessions of Faith and pro- 
ceedings of councils. It is true that certain 
accepted doctrines distinguish Christian be- 
lievers. Without theological convictions the 
religion of Jesus would be either a mass of 
sentimentalism or an icy system of ethics. 
But back of its theology always stands the 
experience out of which the creed comes. 
The creed, indeed, is little more than the 
symbol of the experience. And neither the 
creeds nor the experiences are without vital 
relation to Jesus Christ. 

If we cast out our notion that the New 
Testament is a book of formal science and 
perceive that it is a far more wonderful 
thing — a clinic of souls with Jesus as the 
Chief Surgeon — we will find abundant proof 
of this general statement. John the Baptist, 

64 



THE MIEACULOUS PEESON 65 

with his heart made sensitive to the shining 
of God by long years of solitary, prayer-filled 
meditation and burdened to the ground 
with the bitter, useless tragedy of the world's 
sin, stood in the presence of Jesus. He was 
hungry for righteousness and sadly conscious 
that penitence alone could not loose the load. 
But when he looked into the luminous eyes 
of "The one who should come after him," 
his responsive soul flashed into an experience 
that could be expressed only in his "Creed 
of the Sinless Man." "I have need to be 
baptized of thee, and comest thou to me.^" 
Then, when his clear perception was enlarged 
by the vision of the descending dove, for so 
God bent to John's humanity, he saw in Jesus 
the way out of the great tragedy and pro- 
claimed his second creed, that of "The Sin- 
bearing Saviour" : "Behold, the Lamb of God, 
which taketh away the sin of the world." 

What a marvelous day it was that Andrew 
spent with his new friend, Jesus ! We wonder 
why the conversation of those hours was not 
recorded. Possibly, because it outspanned An- 
drew's simple vocabulary. Probably, because 
the words of the Man that day were of small 



GG THE MASTER QUEST 

importance in themselves. What gave the 
day its transcendence was Jesus himself. 
He pushed his way into the fisherman's 
narrow life and, being so great, he burst its 
shell. That is one of Jesus's habits. But 
it was a vast day, for out of its experience 
came forth that creed so significant to the 
long-expecting Jew, the word Andrew shouted 
through the gathering twilight to Simon, 
"We have found the Messiah! We have 
found the Messiah!'" 

The next day Philip walked awhile with 
Jesus, and from such a brief companionship 
came his declaration of faith confessed before 
Nathanael, "We have found him, of whom 
Moses . . . did write, Jesus of Nazareth.'' 
When Nathanael demurred a bit, being 
skeptical, Philip, wiser than many argumen- 
tative preacher-folk, only said, "Come and 
see." He knew real creeds come only from 
seeing. So the doubting but fair-minded 
Israelite came and saw. Before the Man 
from the village of no repute had uttered 
three sentences this new disciple forgot the 
commonplace glare of the day in the blaze of 
his sudden doctrine of the Christ — "Thou 



THE MIRACULOUS PERSON 67 

art the Son of God; thou art the King of 
Israel-" 

The woman of Samaria talked with the 
Master at the well with waxing eagerness 
until, with deft touch, he uncovered her 
guilty past and her sinful present. Then, 
forgetting both her water jar and the 
Stranger's thirst, she hastened to the village 
and wrought her experience and her new 
faith into a dozen words: "Come, see a man, 
which told me all things that ever I did: 
is not this the Christ?" So Peter in his 
moment of illumination, and the centurion 
in his hour of fear at the foot of the cross, and 
Paul in his time of vision on the Damascus 
road, all found their creeds in their contacts 
with the Master. Fundamentally, the Chris- 
tian doctrines of the New Testament were 
born of the Christian experiences of the first 
disciples. 

Since we are of a generation some twenty 
centuries later we may think that our ex- 
periences come from our creeds, that we find 
what our traditions teach us to expect. In 
some measure we are right. Our dogmas 
are maps and guidebooks indicating what we 



68 THE MASTER QUEST 

may look for in our journey. They are sug- 
gestive outlines, but hopelessly mechanical 
until they become vivid and vital through 
the seizure of our own experience. Angelo's 
"David," in its perfect grace, can hardly be 
compared with the living, ruddy shepherd lad 
of Bethlehem. A creed must live to be real. 

From childhood we may hold without 
question the doctrine of Jesus' sinlessness. 
He is one among many, for children are not 
apt fault-finders. But there came a time 
when this indiscriminate hero-worship was 
sadly broken down in the revelation of our 
great ones' faults. We were ready to cry in 
bitterness of soul, "There is none righteous, 
there is none that doeth good, no, not one." 
But when we turn anxiously to Jesus, we find 
that our severest moral expectations are not 
disappointed in his perfect symmetry. There 
is nothing about his life or in his character for 
which we must apologize. In the hour of our 
disappointment in all others, the doctrine of 
the Crystal Christ was born into a newness 
of life. 

In the same vague fashion we believed that 
Jesus is the Lamb of God taking away the sin 



THE MIRACULOUS PERSON 69 

of the world. But we were not greatly con- 
cerned about the matter. Then, in some hour 
of divine illumination, we really saw ourselves 
warped with prejudice, seamed with faults, 
and stained with sin — guilty under the 
sword of implacable law- We despaired of 
any saving virtue of our own and reached 
out desperate hands of trust to the Sin- 
bearer. Only then, as we received the 
almost incredible assurance that our sins were 
forgiven, did we discover our Calvary Creed, 
so dull and gray before, suddenly vibrant 
and glorious with life. 

For years we may have repeated unmean- 
ingly the splendid word, "I believe Jesus is 
the Saviour from the power of sin." It was 
to us a bit of mechanical religion, its power 
latent. But some day into the midst of the 
mightiest moral struggle we ever knew, just 
when we seemed on the brink of defeat, in 
answer to our cry, he entered, and with him 
came to us a great and inexplicable triumph. 
On such a day that creed lived. Emmanuel 
became to us a word of vast significance, for 
God was in our battle, and we were conscious 
of his presence, One like unto a Son of man. 



70 THE MASTER QUEST 

We received from the lips of our mothers 
the simple teaching that He is the Healer, 
the Prince of Peace. But only as we came 
to him in the hard places of life and 
learned his ways of living, did we find rest 
to our souls in vital truth. Thus we dis- 
covered that his yoke is easy and his burden 
is light. And in our Gethsemanes we found 
the tender Son of Mary to be the Healer of 
broken hearts. In our gardens of tears, by 
His grace, "Out of our stony griefs. Bethel 
we raise.'' 

As in the old days all roads led to Rome, 
so always in far fuller measure every Chris- 
tian creed leads through profound experiences 
to Christ. When the hand of the Person 
touches our groping needs, the dull traditions 
of our childhood flame into fervent life. He 
who studies Christianity apart from Christian 
experience may learn something of its anat- 
omy, but will be unspeakably ignorant of 
its vital processes. He who tries to live this 
religion apart from its experiences with 
Christ will dwell in a valley of dry bones. 
Paul describes variously the normal life of 
the disciple. "For me to live is Christ." "I 



THE MIRACULOUS PERSON 71 

can do all things through Christ." "Christ 
in you the hope of glory." "Nevertheless, I 
live; yet not I; Christ liveth in me." The 
foundation, the accomplishment, the hope, 
the fullness of the Christian is in Jesus Christ. 
One of the most persistent errors that 
arise from the failure to fully emphasize this 
personal nature of our faith is the notion that 
Christianity is essentially a matter of conduct. 
We are apt to regard "Christian" and "good 
man" as terms of nearly identical content. 
Certainly, such goodness as is possible to a dis- 
ciple is included in his discipleship; but only as 
a corollary, an incident consequent to the per- 
sonal relation with the Christ. As he grows 
in his acquaintance with the Master he will 
be less and less consciously moral. No one 
can conceive into what richness of comrade- 
ship with him we shall come in the ages yet to 
be. But in that time our habits of right- 
eousness will be so unchangeable and our 
characters so fixed in holiness by the presence 
of this Friend that mere right-doing will seem 
as elemental and automatic as the physical 
process of speech. Then the sins that so 
easily beset even the holiest will be as ab- 



72 THE MASTER QUEST 

surdly impossible as the worst of vices or 
crimes now appear. The fellowship of Christ 
will be more wonderful than ever in its plain 
realizations and its mystic promises. 

However, being still children, we need to 
remember that learning to talk was in its 
time a struggle and an achievement. The 
victory over the particular temptation, the 
elimination of the moral blunder, the growing 
appreciation of the higher ethics are of vast 
immediate importance. They are altogether 
too important to be thrown into confusion 
by shortsighted thinking. When we look far 
enough to see clearly, we will discover that in 
moral accomplishment there is a more ex- 
cellent way. The foothills lie between us 
and the mountains, but we go by them, not 
over them; we outclimb them without ever 
setting foot on their rocky slopes. We are 
not out to climb foothills. The mountains are 
before us. As we stretch forward toward an 
intenser friendship with Jesus we pass above 
the elevation of our highest ethics without 
moral struggle and almost without notice. 
Our experiences with the Person of the Gospel 
on the intellectual side produce our creeds and. 



THE MIKACULOUS PERSON 73 

on the practical side, our morality, but they 
themselves are beyond comparison greater 
than either right believing or right doing. 

In this indirect way of lifting men into high 
moral achievement by his friendship Jesus is 
not departing from the ordinary human way. 
There are, of course, other than personal forces 
that make for righteousness. The hope 
of reward, terrestrial or celestial, is hardly 
worth the mention, because its base is mere 
selfishness and its results are superficial. The 
admiration for high nobility may stir some 
men to noble endeavor. But the magnetic 
fields of impersonal ideals are too circum- 
scribed to include many of us in any adequate 
fashion. We look up and admire the stars, 
but the earth laughs at their distance and 
holds us fast. Emerson, indeed, sings, 

**When Duty whispers low, *Thou must/ 
The youth replies, *I can.' " 

But so few of us are Emersonian. We 
must have something more vivid and colorful 
than abstract duty to make us worthy. Even 
the poet admits in his couplet that the 
magnetism of Duty is a waning, not a waxing 



74 THE MASTER QUEST 

force. He intimates that one of the tragedies 
of age is its loss of youthful idealism. 

But the man whose ideals are thoroughly 
personalized will some day attain them. 
Abstractions may mean very little to us, but 
few can escape the grip of the persons who 
really enter our lives. The son who remem- 
bers that his mother is praying for him and 
trusting him and expecting great things of 
him is not apt to go far wrong. The husband 
who does not forget his wife's goodby kiss 
and the father who feels the clinging of baby 
arms around his neck are well armored 
against gross sins. A man's choice of friends is 
his choice of character. The determining fac- 
tor in the tragedy of Macbeth 's bloody career 
was the granite ambition of his wife. Jean 
Valjean found his redemption in the sudden 
friendship of the godly Bishop. It is not sur- 
prising, then, that the mighty personal mag- 
netism of God revealed in Jesus Christ should 
redeem men from habits of willful sin and con- 
stantly lift them to higher levels of well-doing. 

The dynamic reason for Christian ethics 
lies not in the worth of righteousness, but in 
the fact that the Master is in the highest 



THE MIRACULOUS PEESON 75 

degree ethical. Out of our love for him is 
born our worthiness. Our moral choices are 
not abstractly but personally determined. 
His desire is our law, his character our ideal, 
his approbation our reward. The mightiest 
phrase in all the world is just this, "For his 
sake." It has drawn men out of the ditch of 
their sin; it has strengthened them in patient 
well-doing; it has persuaded them from all 
they held dear and has sent them to the ends 
of the earth through hardship and danger 
with joy; it has made martyrdom sweet to 
them. This imperial devotion to a Man has 
built churches, erected hospitals, established 
schools, opened continents, civilized savage 
tribes, freed races, and purified the civic life 
of nations. The words are continually true: 

"I know of a land that is sunk in shame. 

Of souls that stumble and tire. 
I know of a Name, a Name, a Name 

Will set that land on fire. 
Its letters, coals, its syllables flame, 
I know of a Name, a Name, a Name 

Will set that land on fire." 

For His sake Paul gave up friends, ambi- 
tions, the scholar's ease, and became as the 
oflscouring of the earth; for His sake Luther 



76 THE MASTER QUEST 

was ready to face the princes of state and 
church — ''if every tile on the roofs of Worms 
were a grinning devil;" for His sake Living- 
stone crucified himself on that rude cross 
that he made with his toilsome journeys 
through swamp and forest and desert in 
savage Africa; for His sake Clara Barton 
carried the Red Cross of mercy into plague- 
smitten and war-ravaged places, and Frances 
Willard bore the white banner of temperance 
east and west throughout our land. If, some 
time in heaven, a trumpet-voiced angel were 
to ask the assembled host of those who have 
suffered much and wrought many things the 
reason for all their labor and sacrifice, the 
answer would come rolling back, "For His 
sake; because we love Him." 

The relation between this personal ac- 
quaintance with God revealed most fully in 
Jesus Christ and our Christian creeds is 
crystallized in the word of an old and wise 
man. When asked why he believed the 
Bible, he responded, "Because I know the 
Author." The relation of that knowledge 
with conduct is expressed as succinctly in 
Charles Kingsley's reply to one who asked 



THE MIRACULOUS PERSON 77 

him the reason for his strong, sweet hfe. He 
modestly repHed, "I have a Friend/' Mr. 
Drummond tells of a young woman who 
lived her short life in a tender glory of saint- 
liness. After her death her friends discovered 
her secret, if such it was, in a slip of paper 
contained in a locket about her neck, a kind 
of blessed phylactery. On it were the words, 
"Whom having not seen, I love.'' That is 
a wonderful story of redemption that Mase- 
field tells in his Everlasting Mercy. But the 
flaming heart of Saul Kane's conversion 
was Jesus; the glory of his experience was the 
White Christ; the hope of his future was in 
the strong hands of the Divine Plowman. 
The Quaker woman coming at the moment of 
his utter disgust with the life he lived brought 
him face to face with his greater sin. 

" *Saul Kane/ she said, 'when next you drink. 
Do me the gentleness to think 
That every drop of Drink accursed 
Makes Christ within you die of thirst; 
That every dirty word you say 
Is one more flint upon his way. 
Another thorn about his head. 
Another mock by where he tread; 
Another nail, another cross. 
All that you are is that Christ's loss.' " 



78 THE MASTEK QUEST 

But the sinner heard the voice and knew 
the joy "Of some one coming home to-night." 
He entered into a Christian experience. 

•*I knew that Chrisl had given me birth 
To brother all the souls of earth. 

"O glory of the lighted mind. 
How dead I'd been, how dumb, how blind! 
The station brook to my new eyes. 
Was babbling out of paradise. 
The waters rushing from the rain 
Were singing, *Christ is risen again!' " 

**0 Christ, who holds the open gate, 
O Christ, who drives the furrow straight, 
O Christ, the plow, O Christ, the laughter 
Of holy white birds following after, 
Lo, all my heart's field red and torn, 
And thou wilt bring the young green corn. 
The corn that makes the holy bread 
By which the soul of man is fed, 
The holy bread, the food unpriced. 
Thy everlasting mercy, Christ." 

Christianity is the rehgion of a Person and 
the Person is a miracle. That is to say, he 
is unique in character and in hfe. He can 
be compared with other men only in part. 
He possesses a certain lofty quality that has 
no human similitude. He is inexplicable. 
The most thorough analysis leaves him a 



THE MIKACULOUS PERSON 79 

sublime mystery. Beyond our farthest cer- 
tainty lies the inexhaustible question con- 
cerning him. Jesus imperatively suggests 
God. In him there is nothing incongruous 
with our highest estimate of the Divine. If 
God were to express himself in human form 
to-day, we could not imagine that God-man 
different from Jesus. The burden of proof is 
upon those who assert the Galilaean's exclu- 
sive humanity. 

If one think superficially, he will turn for 
proof of the Master's miraculous nature to 
the virgin birth, to his deeds of healing, to 
his resurrection. But to profound thought 
all these become merely incidental to the 
greater miracle of himself. He gives credi-, 
bility to the other wonders recorded, not 
they to him. Human heredity does not seem 
causally adequate to account for this Person. 
He is so different from all other men that it 
is diflScult to believe that he entered the 
arena of life in just the same fashion. It is 
easier to hold that the Divine must have 
touched him uniquely. It is an incongruity 
to think that one so perfect, even in his 
humanity, as Jesus, would be as powerless 



80 THE MASTER QUEST 

among the natural forces as the primitive 
generation of his day. To imagine that such 
a Lord of Life could be held by death is 
almost an impossibility. Admit him, and 
his deeds of mastership follow as a matter of 
course. A thoughtful man has suggested the 
necessary value of wonder and lamented the 
fate of him whose exact science has sup- 
planted his gift of marveling. He may rest 
content. We will never cease wondering at 
Jesus. 

Jesus is so many-sided that the ages will be 
run before we have uncovered the last facet 
of his character with its individual gleam of 
glory. But we may measure him in our 
rough and partial human way as we do a 
circumference by fixing three points. Other 
phases of his character and life might be 
chosen and would, doubtless, lead to the same 
result. But these are based so securely in 
the common knowledge of to-day that they 
need no scaffolding of certified records to 
sustain them. And each of them ends in 
miraculous implications in the Person, Jesus 
Christ. 

The claims made by the Master may well 



THE MIEACULOUS PEKSON 81 

stand first in this measurement. That the 
Jesus of the evangehsts is historical seems 
obvious. It is far easier to beheve that the 
composite picture painted by the four is from 
Hfe than to hold that such superlative genius 
could rise in that age, give the world this one 
Character matchless in all literature and 
pass, leaving behind no further trace of its 
greatness. Further, it is impossible for 
these estimates of himself, some spoken by 
his own lips, others uttered undenied in his 
presence, and still others involved in his 
deeds or his manner of speech, to be sep- 
arated from the sober tenor of the story as 
interpolations or bits of fervid rhetoric with- 
out mutilation of the record beyond literarj^ 
credence. 

John the Baptist said of him without 
rebuke, "Behold, the Lamb of God which 
taketh away the sin of the world." Conscious 
of how sin and guilt cling to the individual, 
we may well cry, "Who is this that cometh 
from Galilee to bear the sins of men?" 
Nathanael, Israelite without guile, confessed 
his faith, "Thou art the Son of God," and 
heard no denial. To the Samaritan woman 



82 THE MASTER QUEST 

he said plainly, "I am the Christ." When 
Peter made the same declaration in his 
presence he declared that the impulsive dis- 
ciple had perceived the truth through a divine 
illumination. 

Jesus invited the whole weary and heavy- 
laden caravan of men to come to him for rest 
and to learn the way of peace from him. He 
declared that he was the Vine from which all 
his followers should derive their growth, their 
fruitage, their life. He taught that real life 
lay in an intense comradeship with him, as 
though one were to eat his flesh. He sent 
forth his apostles with the commission to 
proclaim his teachings to every creature and 
to iliduct all who believed into the faith with 
a threefold baptism in which his own name 
was to be coupled with that of the infinite 
God. And he promised that his abiding pres- 
ence should be with them to the end of the 
age. He insisted that he was greater than 
Solomon; he rescinded the laws of Moses; 
he challenged the world to convict him of sin; 
he called upon men to honor him as they 
honor the Father; he asserted that before him 
should all nations be judged on the basis of 



THE MIKACULOUS PEKSON 83 

the treatment of those who stood in his place; 
as the ultimate felicity of those who proved 
worthy, he offered participation in his 
presence and joy. These are only suggestive 
instances of the spirit that characterized his 
whole life as recorded. That a man with 
the ethical appreciation of Jesus should reveal 
such immeasurable egotism is passing strange, 
even incredible, unless, indeed, it be a 
divine egotism. 

But the real miracle lies in the fact that the 
keen-minded, blunt world has not continually 
branded him as the most preposterously con- 
ceited of all impostors ever born. Sensual 
Pilate and the hypocritical Pharisees and the 
bawling mob did condemn him, but the men 
who gave that age its glory in its world- 
mastering religious and ethical literature 
believed in him. Since then the same ver- 
dict has been rendered over and over. That 
group which has far and aw ay the longest list 
of names made glorious by large unselfishness; 
that, as a whole, is cleaner and nobler and 
intellectually keener than any other; that, 
because of its ideals and moral achievements, 
is expected to be in all particulars worthier 



84 THE MASTER QUEST 

than the rest, the Christian men of the 
world, accept these claims with hardly a 
question as belonging by right to Jesus. 

Even many thinkers who hold him but one 
teacher among many, denying these boldly 
unique assertions of power, insist most em- 
phatically that he was a good man. Hear 
Renan, who may speak for the rest: "What- 
ever surprises the future may hold, Jesus 
will never be surpassed." But such an 
admission is a confession of disorganized 
logic, an absurd contradiction in terms. We 
may argue that Jesus was a most egotistical 
fool, or an irreverent impostor, or the Miracu- 
lous Man. But no real thinker can hold 
him to be at the same time a humble, wise 
man and a conceited fool, a true man and a 
cheat. These high self-estimates belong to 
Jesus and are wrought into the world's con- 
ception of him whether as a man in history or 
as a character in fiction. He has impressed 
men as being so profoundly royal that these 
more than imperial assertions of authority 
and power seem eminently fitting. In the 
world's acceptance of him and his claims lies 
the greater miracle. 



THE MIEACULOUS PEKSON 85 

In his plan for winning the world we find 
the second implication of the miraculous in 
Jesus. Now, with twenty centuries of success 
wrought out, with a great institution devoted 
to him, with a dominant civilization named 
after him, it is easy to say that his method 
was the wisest. But he made it wise; with 
another it would have been an abject failure. 
Had we been with him when he walked the 
gray, winding roads of the land since called 
holy because his footprints were in its dust, 
we would have declared his plans a wild way 
of committing suicide. Not lacking Thomas's 
devotion, we would have said with the 
doubter, "Let us also go, that we may die 
with him." 

His way was hopelessly antagonistic to the 
very ones whom he sought to win. His 
approach to every class seemed deliberately 
chosen to arouse their most intense opposi- 
tion. To scholars skilled in the intricacies of 
logic and able to breathe the thin air of ab- 
stractions, he must have seemed a very home- 
spun preacher with his stories about farmers 
sowing seed, women baking bread, men 
catching fish, a run-away boy keeping swine. 



86 THE MASTER QUEST 

some girls at a wedding. How could he 
expect wrestlers in profound philosophy to 
give heed to such simplicities. When the 
unlearned multitudes gathered about ready 
to follow him, he spoke of such deep mysteries 
that they cried, ''These are too hard for us," 
and rose up and left him. To soldiers he 
preached the doctrine of kindness to one's 
enemies and of surrender of personal rights, 
and these in the bluntest terms. Yet he de- 
manded of peaceful fishermen self -crucifixion. 
He did not hesitate to offend the sensitive 
Pharisees by eating with outcasts; he out- 
raged the most intense feelings of the patriots 
of his day by choosing a taxgathering rene- 
gade as one of his immediate followers. 
When we get to heaven it will be a most in- 
teresting bit of news to learn how Simon, the 
zealot, got along with Matthew, the publican, 
the first few days of their companionship. 

Since the people whom he would win had 
lost their national independence, their patriot- 
ism added to the deep glow of their religious 
faith. In fact, the two could hardly be said 
to be separate. They felt an intense rever- 
ence for Moses and large respect for those 



THE MIRACULOUS PERSON 87 

who sat in Moses' seat. Their fear of God 
was so deep that they felt their Kps unworthy 
even to utter his specific Name. His Sab- 
bath, the most notable outward sign of their 
devotion, was exceedingly sacred. But this 
Carpenter-Prophet from a disreputable town 
condemned with scorching invective the 
scribes and the Pharisees, set his own word 
in opposition to that of Moses, announced 
the blasphemous heresy that the Sabbath was 
made for man and that he was Lord of the 
sacred day, declared that he was the Wonder- 
ful, the Messiah, even the Son of God. We 
can in no wise imagine the horror-stricken 
indignation crowded into that sentence of 
awful accusation, ''He hath not only broken 
the Sabbath, but he hath made himself the 
Son of God." Did ever a man so surely 
invite complete failure.^ 

His plans of conquest did not stop with the 
limits of his own ace. He would win the 
world. But he made none of the usual plans 
for such a vast campaign. He gathered no 
treasure, he trained no army, he organized 
no formal institution, he wrote no book. 
His method seems ludicrously ineffective for 



88 THE MASTER QUEST 

world-conquest. He merely sent out a few 
unlettered disciples with the recollections of 
three years' associations with him, to repeat 
his strange and unacceptable teachings and 
to tell the disgrace of his crucifixion and the 
incredible tale of his resurrection. The 
ancient Roman graphito showing a crucified 
ass with the inscription, "Alexander's God," 
not only immortalizes the name of that early 
Christian, but illustrates the normal reaction 
of Jesus's plan. Thrust out against the 
Greek pride of learning, the Roman lust of 
power, the Jewish intensity of religion, the 
world's sin and self-love, how could such a 
plan succeed.^ 

But here is the miracle. It is succeeding. 
Throughout the world, wherever this gospel 
is proclaimed, men of all sorts and classes 
and races are won by the Man. Nor is this 
devotion nominal, superficial, selfish. It is 
genuine, profound, sacrificial. They are en- 
thusiasts in the primitive meaning of the 
word. They are God-possessed men. Paul 
puts the fact into an illuminating sentence, 
"Christ in you, the hope of glory." 

The heart of Christianity beats in Jesus. 



THE MIRACULOUS PERSON 89 

Men are marvelously mastered by One who 
walked the gray ways of earth nearly twenty 
centuries ago. Opposers of this faith may 
pile mountains of explanation in attempting 
to account for this devotion. It remains a 
stubborn fact. The force of men cannot 
break it; the attrition of circumstances can- 
not wear it down; the persuasion of passion 
and pride cannot seduce it. The men who 
forsake the faith lose the warmth of their 
devotion first. Our judgment of the plan is 
not at fault. By itself it would have been an 
insignificant failure. Plus Jesus, it abounds 
in power and accomplishment. Made vital 
in him, the unfittest plan not only wins but 
becomes obviously the only one that could 
win. Can we call him who brings such 
mighty reenforcement that the poorest 
method becomes the only best, anything less 
than The Miraculous Person .^^ 

The third point we discover in exam- 
ining this miracle of personality is the 
impact Jesus makes upon the world. His 
sayings impress all who think with their 
sublime wisdom and power. They are like 
the stars. The child is glad for them; the 



90 THE MASTER QUEST 

unlettered man is stirred by a beauty and 
strength in them that he cannot tell; the 
philosopher wonders before their vast mean- 
ings; the worshiper sees the glory of God in 
them. It was eminently fitting that a star 
should lead the way to Him who was to 
scatter his starry words over the wide firma- 
ment of life. 

The inclusions of Jesus's teachings are 
boundless, but the teachings themselves are 
succinct, girded as though to run a race. 
And they are running far through the 
centuries and around the earth. They are 
compact, crowded into a short sermon, a 
slender group of stories and a few score say- 
ings. But they are measurelessly dynamic. 
Numberless sermons are preached, and books 
without counting are written expanding and 
applying single sentences of the Master 
Teacher. He gave to men a wealth of 
painting and poetry and song when he uttered 
in his carpenter-simplicity those words about 
the one lamb and the ninety and nine, the 
wise girls and the foolish at a wedding, the 
good shepherd who knows his sheep. As the 
creative words of God grew into worlds, so 



THE MIRACULOUS PERSON 91 

these redemptive words of Jesus have ex- 
panded into customs and ideals, laws and 
liberties, far-reaching movements and com- 
plex institutions. 

Briejfly, these other inexplicable qualities 
appear in his messages to men. The genius 
of other sages is national. Socrates was 
essentially a Greek; Marcus Aurelius, a 
Roman; Isaiah, a Jew. But Jesus breaks the 
bonds of Jewish provincialism and speaks to 
the race. The Greek gracefulness, the Ro- 
man thrill of power, the sprightliness of the 
French, the accuracy and broad inclusiveness 
of the German, the forthright simplicity of the 
Anglo-Saxon, all are found in the spacious, 
simple words of the Master. Other men 
utter a proverb now and again that runs far, 
but Jesus's least word is wholly unfettered. 
He is the world's Teacher. 

Further, these words of his are timeless. 
Much ancient good becomes uncouth, but the 
teachings of Jesus never seem antiquated. 
No changed condition of men finds his mes- 
sage unprepared. No new alignment of 
human forces fails to find in his word its clear 
definition and right direction. His speech is 



92 THE MASTER QUEST 

always vital with the spirit of the age. What 
he said so simply to the common people of the 
first century contains the latest practical 
philosophy, urges on the most advanced 
reformation, suggests the newest and highest 
ideals. His utterances do not shift to meet 
the changing facts; they need no unscrupu- 
lous manipulation. But as ''knowledge grows 
from more to more" we enter into an enlarging 
perception of the age-long truth he put into 
them at the beginning. 

Again, Jesus's words have a strange way 
of getting into the hearts of men. Other 
philosophers convince men into a belief. The 
Teacher of Galilee persuades them into a 
deed. Other ethical pronouncements men 
read coolly, commend heartily, neglect ut- 
terly. But about the ethics of Jesus there is a 
compulsion, a strange urgency, that drives 
one into obedience or away from the reading. 
The wayside Prophet, with only two swords 
in his whole company, speaks across the 
centuries with imperial authority. 

In the doctrines of Jesus there is no inac- 
curacy of premises, no flaw of logic, no bit of 
excusable folly. In this he stands alone 



THE MIEACULOUS PEKSON 93 

among the world teachers. A widening 
horizon, a clearer insight, reveals in the 
messages of other thinkers certain incom- 
pletenesses, mistakes or absurdities due to 
aberrations peculiar to themselves or to their 
times. We wish that they might live again, 
if only long enough to revise their legacies of 
wisdom. But the teachings of Jesus need no 
revision. If he were to repeat his message, 
it would be the same; it would not be neces- 
sary to change a word. If we attempt to 
alter the content or to modernize the ex- 
pression of his gospel, the change is for the 
worse. He is the Master in thought and in 
speech. 

Any one of these unique teaching qualities 
by itself would be striking enough, but their 
perfect combination in Jesus lifts him far 
above his fellows and justifies his name. The 
Wonderful. No matter where we seek for a 
credible explanation of this world-wide, age- 
long, flawless, compelling message, we fail to 
find it until we are ready to hear the word of 
Nicodemus: ''Thou art a teacher come from 
God." Nor can we rest on that conservative 
estimate, but with our growing knowledge 



94 THE MASTER QUEST 

we go beyond to the bold confession of 
Peter, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the 
Hving God." 

The most notable element in the impact 
that Jesus makes upon the world is his con- 
stant efficiency. Dr. Dawson has wisely 
called him "The Unavoidable Christ." You 
may not know him, but you cannot ignore 
the multitude of facts that bear the print of 
his hand. Every time you date a letter you 
acknowledge his birth as the pivot on which 
the centuries swing. You may deny him, 
but you cannot deny the potency of his name. 
You may rebel against him, but you cannot 
disregard his ethical commandments. You 
may hate him, but you must daily accept 
blessings from his hand. His freedom is 
manifest in our civic liberties, his democracy 
in our educational system, his charity in our 
benevolent institutions, his purity in our 
homes. His code is acknowledged as the 
highest moral standard; his character, in- 
explicably perfect, is the supreme ethical 
ideal. All these master men not completely, 
but increasingly with a power that marks a 
vigorous life. 



THE MIEACULOUS PEESON 95 

His will is the determining factor in mil- 
lions of lives, and through them it is molding 
the social facts and writing history. Na- 
poleon has said, "He is the Emperor of Love, 
and to-night millions would die for him." 
What is more effective, millions are living for 
him. Jean Paul Richter said, "With his 
pierced hands this crucified Jew has rased 
empires from their foundations and turned the 
streams of history into other channels." This 
is not the deed of a kind of spiritual Hercules, 
more noble than his prototype, but not less 
mythical. The rising enlightenment has left 
the heroes of ancient myths in the shadows 
of humanity's morning, but in the midst of 
its brilliance the Christ sweeps out into vast 
affairs, to far-reaching and various conquest. 
In one of his splendid bursts of eloquence 
Bishop Fowler painted the picture of some of 
the Hebrew giants of soul: Noah, facing a 
laughing world because he heard God; 
Abraham, pushing out into unknown trails 
because he believed God; Elijah, daring the 
hosts of Baal because he knew God. All 
these he crowned with his matchless oratory, 
but after each laureled portrait he cried with 



96 THE MASTER QUEST 

that voice that made men see, *'But he was 
only a barefoot boy running in the hot sands 
before the chariot of the coming King." 
The royal procession of Jesus along the roads 
of life concludes some power in him more 
than human. 

All who think of him seriously are thrilled 
with the strange consciousness that he is alive. 
Not that he lives in some distant sphere or 
separate state of consciousness, but that he 
moves among us. In the sudden paralysis of 
Calvary's tragedy his disciples did think for a 
time that their Master was finally dead and 
that all their high hopes must be buried with 
him. Then something happened. These 
panic-stricken peasants came out of their 
locked room and went down the hostile 
streets of Jerusalem and through Judsea and 
out across the world proclaiming that their 
King was not dead, but alive, and that they 
had seen him. Very strangely that belief 
has never been dissipated. Rather, it has 
spread throughout the world. Some have 
believed because of the historic evidences; 
more have been convinced by the dynamic 
proof of his presence in the affairs of the 



THE MIKACULOUS PEESON 97 

world; more still have had certain vital con- 
tacts with him in the secret places of their 
own souls. But the multitudes, in one way 
or another, by some mighty compulsion have 
believed the incredible. Out from that 
upper room came the glad cry, "He is risen!" 
and more than haK a hundred generations 
since have sent back the response, "He is 
risen, indeed !" 

He lives. Monuments are built to dead 
heroes, saints, and sages. No one thinks of 
rearing a marble shaft to Jesus. He lives. 
Men may academically deny his resurrection, 
but out from such negation comes no hopeful 
philosophy, no inspiring literature, no rich 
art, no gospel. No great reforms, no spiritual 
transformations, no worthy and compelling 
ideals, no high and tender hopes spring from 
the handful of dust that was the Galilsean. 
All such holy accomplishment finds its birth 
in the risen Christ. Peter's dilemma is the 
perplexity of the race: "To whom shall we 
go? Thou hast the words of eternal life!" 
We do not need to go back to the garden of 
Easter to prove the resurrection. Its results 
throng us on every hand. We cannot escape 



98 THE MASTER QUEST 

them or their logic. The unique Hfe of 
Jesus manifest in to-day's affairs shows that 
he is alive in such a fashion as the resur- 
rection implies. 

We have become so used to Jesus that we 
are apt to miss the wonder of him. When we 
stop to realize that our mightiest creeds, our 
loftiest ideals, and our most precious experi- 
ences are gathered about him as their living 
center, then do we see how marvelous he is. 
When we think of Jesus' strange claims and 
the world's stranger acceptance of them, of his 
futile methods and their impossible success, 
of his flawless character and cosmopolitan and 
timeless wisdom, we are ready to say with 
the guileless Israelite, ''Thou art the Son of 
God; thou art the King of men." But only 
as we bow before him and make our vows of 
trust and loyalty with our hands between 
his pierced palms, do we feel the personal 
touch of the deathless Christ and find the 
secret of Christian assurance in "knowing 
Him whom we have believed," the Miraculous 
Person. 



IV 

THE MAN FROM NAZARETH 

I BELIEVE profoundly in the deity of the 
Lord Jesus Christ. But that august creed 
is far from being clearly defined in my mind. 
It is like an angle that extends to infinite in- 
clusions. It is hardly true that I hold this 
belief. Rather, it holds me with a kind of 
mighty logical compulsion. It stands in my 
thought as the only alternative to the total 
rejection of the fact of Jesus. For I lack the 
mental ingenuity that might enable me to 
include in my gospel the elements that con- 
stitute Jesus the Son of man and at the same 
time exclude those that determine him to be 
the Son of God. The revelation of "The 
Very Man" reveals as well "The Very God." 

Besides, I discover in myself a compulsion 
of need. I am a Christian because I am as 
deeply willing to trust the perfect authority 
and the eternal adequacy of the Son of God 
as I am eager to find comfort in the sym- 
pathy, inspiration in the example, and joy in 
the comradeship of the Elder Brother of 

99 



100 THE MASTER QUEST 

men. Moreover, there is in me an imperative 
and intuitive demand that these helps be 
found reenf orcing each other in the same per- 
son. The faith of Browning, robust in intel- 
lectual vigor, states this problem and its solu- 
tion in "Saul." David is trying to struggle 
with the mighty Saul up out of the pit of 
black despair into which Israel's king had 
fallen. So he sings of life and its happiness 
and its glory, and not without a measure of 
success. But at the last his wit and wisdom 
fail him. Then he turns passionately to the 
infinite God. 

"Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst thou — 

so wilt thou! 
So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost 

crown — 
And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down 

One spot for the creature to stand in." 

But even Infinite Love cannot save Saul, 
although he cannot be saved without it. 
The king must see for himself that the Divine 
Lover enters into his experience, the common 
human experience, of weakness and suffering, 
and so comes within the reach of his human 
love. It is not enough that God's love grip 



THE MAN FROM NAZARETH 101 

man. Man's love must also grip God. So 
the shepherd singer cries: 

"It is by no breath. 
Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with 

death! 
As thy love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved 
Thy power that exists with and for it of being Beloved! 
He who did most shall bear most; the strongest shall stand 

the most weak. 
'Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! my flesh that 

I seek 
In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be 
A Face like my face that receives thee; a man like to me. 
Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this 

band 
Shall throw open the gates of a new life to thee! See the 

Christ stand!" 

Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of man, 
crowned in the glory and the might of the 
Lord of hosts and yet robed in the dusty, 
warm humanity of the Man of Galilee, so 
fully meets SauFs uttermost need, and mine, 
that I am persuaded that I have not made 
unto myself an incredible man-god, but that 
I have found Emmanuel. 

Certainly, this satisfying faith involves a 
mystery, a thing insufferable to self-sufficient 
thinkers. But what simplest word of the 



102 THE MASTER QUEST 

most ordinary creed of our everyday lives 
does not open before our blind eyes the 
gates of the Infinite? Only the most prim- 
itive philosopher is unaware of the insoluble 
problems that throng the sweep of his hands. 
The initial declaration of the mingling of the 
Divine and the human in the Master carries 
the whole matter obviously beyond our 
mental reach. But who can comprehend the 
interwrought material and spiritual phe- 
nomena of his own experience? Or who can 
explain the simplest interactions of force and 
matter or satisfactorily define either that 
which seems to move or that which seems to 
be moved? For all our science is based upon 
a faith too profound for ordered demon- 
stration. 

Nor is it necessary that we reduce this glad 
belief concerning Jesus to a syllogism. Our 
soul outruns our slow-paced reason and calls 
back from the heights, "I am acquainted with 
Him whom I have believed/' and is satisfied. 
The calm philosophical statement of John, 
"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt 
among us," cannot restrain the surging Amen 
of his soul that bursts into a sudden rapture, 



THE MAN FROM NAZAEETH 103 

"And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the 
only begotten of the Father." The imperial 
arrogance of reason demanding formal proofs 
becomes petty impertinence to people who 
see. 

All this I steadfastly beheve. But here 
the emphasis is placed upon the manhood of 
Jesus. Nor in this am I missing the way 
Jesus marked, for ever he was pushing his 
deity back and thrusting his humanity upon 
the attention of men. Nor has this stress 
anything in it of the plan of art. It is full of 
the unconsciousness of truth. He enters 
simply and abundantly into the experiences 
of men. The composite story of his life is so 
unstudied that it becomes an almost colorless 
medium through which we see him, winsome 
with unpretended brotherliness, moving along 
the ways of the land that he made holy. The 
cradle at Bethlehem, the saw and the hammer 
at Nazareth, the hunger in the wilderness, 
and the weariness at Jacob's Well, the longing 
for comradeship in Gethsemane, and the cry, 
"I thirst," on Calvary, spell out in deeds the 
words that Pilate spoke, "Behold, the man!" 
He was "very man." 



104 THE MASTER QUEST 

Moreover, let us be forever glad that he 
did not choose to be human in a kind of 
detached fashion, a King of kings, a Sage of 
sages, a Saint of saints, exalted in the acci- 
dents of life and dazzling those who would 
honor him into a distant adoration by every 
now and then drawing back the robe of his 
flesh a bit that the divinity of him might be 
seen shining beneath. On the blessed con- 
trary, he ever mingles with the crowd who do 
not fear to throng him. He will be down 
among men touching shoulders with them in 
the dusty affairs of their lives, drawing the 
children around his knees, and bringing to all 
in the homeliest fashion rest and encourage- 
ment and vision and life. He dominates 
men not because he is so far above them, but 
because he is so near to them. 

The heart of His message beat in terms that 
men understood. To his closest friends he 
was supremely "The Man." The great task 
was just to fall into step with him. "Who- 
soever puts his confidence in him shall be 
saved," said they in munificent phrase. With 
unconscious splendor, this simple brother- 
hood took for their work the estabhshment 



THE MAN FKOM NAZAEETH 105 

of their Leader's world-wide kingdom. They 
had almost no conception of the diflaculty of 
the task or of its far-reaching glory. It was 
sufficient that he wished it who was their 
leader. But his prophetic cry, "And I, if I 
be lifted up from the earth, will draw all 
men unto me," was more to them than a 
rallying cry. They felt in it the measureless 
yearning of his humanity for the complete 
brotherhood. So it gripped their hearts. In 
parable and in miracle, in wayside conversa- 
tion and in friendly meal, these men discov- 
ered in him and wonderfully revealed to us 
that subtle allurement which drew men into 
the common touch even while their reverence 
grew larger. 

And so we find him, and so we dare to 
walk with him in the simplicities of life. 
And so we are very glad! We bow in a 
hushed and humbled reverence before the 
Most High seated on the circle of the heavens, 
and suddenly our worship blooms into a 
warm and fragrant joy as we discover God's 
eternal glory in the homely shining of the 
Carpenter. 

Jesus is truly human and in a magnificent 



106 THE MASTER QUEST 

fashion. His soul must have for its expres- 
sion a body beautiful and massive. It is a 
great pity that the first painters of him who 
fixed the type for his portraits had not been 
rugged Scandinavians instead of slender 
Italians. Then our thought of the Master 
would have been colored, not by the graceful, 
effeminate sweetness of Raphael, but by the 
mighty brawn and patience of Thorwaldsen. 
The result must have been a more mascuhne 
Christianity, a greater power in the Church 
of God. 

Such a conception would be far truer to the 
person of the Man. He must have been of 
magnificent physical proportions. That is 
intimated by every detail of his life story. 
The holy motherhood itself would imply 
somewhat of physical perfectness in Mary. 
And such a conclusion would be supported 
by her steadfast courage and her mastery of 
situations as indicated again and again in the 
Gospels. Royal blood and generations of peas- 
ant life were joined in the physical heritage 
of Jesus. The Galilsean hills, the playground 
of his youth, could not but put strength into 
his limbs and expand his chest. His work 



THE MAN FEOM NAZARETH 107 

as a carpenter brought him much into the 
open air; the handhng of the rude tools de- 
veloped bone and brawn; the purity and 
sanity of his life could issue only in an 
abounding and mastered vitality. 

He must have been brawny, for the work 
of his ministry was not for a delicate man. 
That struggle in the wilderness, where the 
storm of heart and soul so beat upon him that 
he forgot to eat, would try a strong man to 
the utmost. Other men have, indeed, endured 
as long an abstinence, but what other fought 
so mighty a battle while he fasted and at the 
end came forth so kingly strong as to immedi- 
ately command the allegiance of a stiff- 
necked, hard-hitting tribe like those peasants 
of Galilee? 

Equally conclusive of his physical perfect- 
ness are the toils and the strains of the three- 
years' ministry. The continual travel, the 
hard and irregular fare, the outpouring of 
his personality in the healing of disease, the 
steady pull of the world's misery at his heart, 
the stress of ever trying to tell forth to those 
who were dull of understanding and slow of 
belief the saving truth that throbbed within 



108 THE MASTEK QUEST 

him until his heart was near to bursting — all 
these fought so terribly against the strength 
and the endurance of the Carpenter that only 
the most vigorous body could have borne the 
burden of his task. 

At the end of these years of constant 
struggle came the last week as a climax of 
labor and turmoil. In every way these last 
days contained the superlatives of his life. 
In them he summoned to a last desperate 
stand the waning hope that the nation would 
still receive its Messiah. How bitterly pa- 
thetic was his triumphant entry when, even 
under the gloom of the cross, he hoped im- 
possibly that the hosannas would not turn to 
''Crucify him! Crucify him!'' Now, too, 
he dehvered those heroic frontal attacks upon 
his most powerful enemies. In conversation 
and exhortation, in parable and overwhelm- 
ing question and answer, he forced them to 
an immediate choice of alternatives. They 
must accept the message or kill the prophet. 
What dynamite of Jflesh and soul must have 
been behind those words that sent the 
officers back to the Pharisees without their 
prisoner, saying, ''Never man spake like this 



THE MAN FKOM NAZARETH 109 

man." Could a frail ascetic, weakened with 
long labor, compel the flight of those greedy 
robbers in the temple courts? Could a man 
trembling with physical exhaustion so hold 
the allegiance of the crowd — fickle enough, 
as it proved — that his enemies must seek out 
his rendezvous and take him secretly before 
the dawn? If we forgot all else, we would 
thrill with the highest admiration at the 
sight of this Galilaean Peasant defying to 
their very teeth the mightiest men of the 
nation, and for a whole week going about un- 
scathed. What a gladiator of God Jesus 
was! 

Nor were the quiet hours of the week when 
he gave the last profound counsels to his dis- 
ciples much less exhausting. The brother- 
hood of toil and danger and high purpose was 
so close and vital: these men leaned upon 
him so hard, they would miss him so much, 
he loved them so! Such wolfish enemies 
were about them, such stormy responsibilities 
were to be laid on their shoulders, such perse- 
cutions and deaths awaited them, that he, 
looking ahead, must have bent under the 
strain of it all. The last hours with them 



no THE MASTER QUEST 

were infinitely precious. They must be 
crowded with the right words spoken in the 
wisest fashion. There was so much that the 
apostles did not understand, so much they 
understood amiss. They knew so little of 
the fury of the storm about to break upon 
them. He must not through any relaxation 
fail in these last teachings. What tense 
hours they were for him ! Altogether, it was 
a week of typhoons and tidal waves. But 
the strong hand and the clear eye and the 
steady nerves of the Pilot of Galilee failed 
not. 

Then came the night of defeat. With the 
last reserves of his strength he kept the 
solemn, prophetic passover; he instituted the 
new memorial rite; he uttered that wonderful 
valedictory for the apostles and for all gen- 
erations. At that hour too he made bitter 
acknowledgment that Judas was lost, and 
that, for a little time, Peter would fail him. 
Afterward the tempest that made Gethsem- 
ane the abiding symbol of heartbreak smote 
upon him hour after hour. Upon its waning 
thunder followed the harsh injustice of the 
trials, the mockery of Herod, the scourging. 



THE MAN FEOM NAZARETH 111 

the thorn-coronation, the changed shouts of 
the blmd, forgetful people. Through it all 
he bore himseK like a man strong in self- 
mastery. There was neither panic of the 
flesh nor involuntary cry for mercy. 

The last vestige of his strength gone, he 
fainted, indeed, under the cross. So we are 
forever sure that he fought the battle with the 
strength of a man and not with the infinite 
endurance of God. His patience and courage 
we will forget for the moment. But could 
any except the most perfect body express 
such a high soul in toil and pain and en- 
durance to the end.^ Surely, that artist 
whose "Descent from the Cross" shows the 
Imperial Sufferer a man of broad shoulders 
and sturdy limbs and kingly height is more 
nearly true in his portraiture than are those 
who appeal to our pity more than to our 
admiration by painting Jesus a man of 
delicate form and well-nigh womanly grace. 
Had stalwart Saul returned in the flesh to 
his kingdom when the dawn of the gospel was 
breaking among its hills, he would have 
found Jesus looking with level eyes into his 
own. 



112 THE MASTER QUEST 

But the full proof of manhood is not found 
in stature. That abides in mind and heart 
and soul. Isaac Watts, almost dwarjfish in 
body, very quaintly spoke the word which 
he, himself, so well illustrated: 

"Could I reach from pole to pole. 

Or hold the ocean in my span, 
I must be measured by the soul; 
The mind's the measure of the man." 

We would be disappointed if we found that 
this Man of men were not great in stature. 
But our disappointment would be a thousand- 
fold more bitter than that of Samuel when 
he saw Saul's petty soul mocking his kingly 
height if we were to find that Jesus, being 
noble without, were insignificant within. This, 
however, is a fanciful fear. For when we 
hear his words and see his deeds and touch 
his life, then even the massive beauty of his 
body is forgotten in the splendor of his soul. 
Twenty centuries agree with Pilate's verdict, 
"I find no fault in him," and with that other 
utterance of the Roman governor, prof ounder 
than he knew, "Behold, the man." There 
appears no flaw in Jesus. We cannot imagine 
him changed save for the worse. 



THE MAN FEOM NAZAKETH 113 

His humanity is so obvious that we begin 
to measure him after the fashion of a man. 
For, after all, there are but three rooms in 
life, and in them we all live nobly or ignobly 
as we will. There are the w^orkshop, where 
deeds are wrought, the quiet chamber, where 
we think and dream, and the homely living 
room, where we meet one another. As a man 
shows himself in these three rooms, so is he. 
We discover Jesus, the doer, in his miracles; 
Jesus, the thinker, we find in his parables; 
we come to know Jesus, the comrade, in his 
daily contacts with men. The units and 
terms of this measuring and weighing of 
Jesus are certainly inadequate; but the 
method is right and the results correct as far 
as we are able to go. 

This, further, is true and relevant. With 
Jesus, as with us all, the real worth of deed 
and word and human touch is in their channel 
values, what they carry of ourselves. If 
back of them there is no thoughtfulness of 
mind, no fervency of heart, no sincerity of 
soul, then they are no more than sounding 
brass and tinkling cymbals. But if there 
abide behind them true worthiness, then in 



114 THE MASTER QUEST 

word and in deed and in the silent pull of 
character and life there will be a rich and 
resonant music to stir the hearts of those who 
hear to loftier aspiration and to nobler living. 
If Jesus's manhood be truly of supreme 
worth, his fullness must surge along these 
channels to meet the needs of men. 

What a study is here! The implications 
of Jesus are infinite. Agassiz spent a summer 
going over his backyard on his hands and 
knees discovering new worlds. So, again and 
again, we may return to a single incident in 
the Master's life poring over it microscop- 
ically, and ever with the explorer's joy. 
Other whole biographies become exhausted 
and are laid aside. The very trifles in the 
story of Jesus are inexhaustible. They offer 
to every generation wide, unexplored spaces 
which include seas and continents of throb- 
bing truth. That is one reason for the con- 
tinuance of the preaching function and of 
the churchgoing habit. But, however fasci- 
nating this incidental and particular study 
may be, there remains the need for the wide- 
angled view of the Master and of his life that 
shall include the massed might of his miracles, 



THE MAN FEOM NAZAEETH 115 

the interwrought wisdom of his parables, and 
the whole warm allurement of his comrade- 
ship. So can we comprehensively measure 
the Man. 

The fact that Jesus wrought miracles has 
long ago lost its wonder to me. They are 
but the chips of his workshop when we con- 
sider them in terms of power. K our phi- 
losophy discovers in this world of beating life 
nothing more than mechanics and can speak 
only of law and force, there may be in it no 
place for the miraculous. But if personal 
will be the immanent dynamic, then the only 
difference between the natural and the 
miraculous as a matter of accomplishment is 
in the method. The one is God's usual way, 
the other his unusual way of doing things. 

When we think of the use of miracles and 
remember the responsibility and freedom of 
man and the moral interests of God, the 
unusual deeds of Jesus become the startling 
exclamation marks of the good tidings. 
The trifles of everyday are, indeed, ready to 
break into the utterance of divine truth at 
a touch. There are "sermons in stones, 
books in running brooks.'' 



116 THE MASTER QUEST 

"Earth is crammed with heaven 
And every common bush is on fire with God; 
But only those who see take off their shoes.'* 

And those who see are so few, prophet- 
souls who stand alone and cry great messages 
to the multitudes. But the shifting, curious, 
and often angry crowds, their senses dulled 
by the constant repetition of the common- 
place, "stand around and pluck black- 
berries." They are so familiar with the 
surface of life that they are incredulous con- 
cerning any unlearned deeper facts. ''They 
seeing, see not, and hearing, they hear not, 
neither do they understand." A miracle in 
the common things of such lives surprises 
into an alertness that may perceive the 
deeper spiritual word travailing to be under- 
stood. Through the monotonous voices of 
the ordinary, wonderful but unheeded, the 
extraordinary of the Master breaks keenly 
with the reveille of redemption. 

Nor can these deeds be judged apart from 
Him who did them. It is not surprising that 
Jesus could work wonders. Had he been 
able with no more than the power common 
to men, there would have been cause for 



THE MAN FKOM NAZAEETH 117 

marveling. For, in such a case, we would 
be face to face with the incredible union of an 
unmarred wisdom, a perfect purity, an 
infinite compassion, on the one hand, and, 
on the other, the creeping knowledge and the 
clinging might of an infant race. So would 
he be, not the full-orbed Master of the ages, 
but an inexplicable creature with head and 
heart of gold and hands and feet of clay. 
Why should not the Master be as strong 
without as within, as dominant in the 
passing material as in the abiding spiritual.^ 
And why should God always do as he usually 
does.^ Is he to be bound by the habits of 
one moment out of his eternities, of one tiny 
sphere in his far-flung universe? Why should 
not his perfect Revealer use to challenge our 
attention to the evangel whatever trumpet 
seemed best fitted to catch our ear? Since 
we are children, why should he not spell out 
his message for us in vivid pictures and in 
words of one syllable? Miracles are possible 
with the Omnipotent; they are fitted to the 
Messenger, to the message, and to the pecu- 
liarities of human needs. 

Not at the deeds of Christ, then, but at the 



118 THE MASTER QUEST 

fashion in which he did them, we all may well 
wonder. Like symbols, their significance lies 
not in themselves but in what they tell of 
him who wrought them. Always his miracles 
were unselfish. He was often hungry, but he 
never changed stones into loaves or multiplied 
fishes for his need. Rather, he was willing to 
bear the shameful imputation of charity. He 
was many times wearied on the long, gray 
road, but never by any miracle did he restore 
his strength or shorten the way. It was so 
like him, that only the call of a sinning, 
hungry soul could rouse him from the utter 
weariness that stopped his dragging feet at 
Jacob's Well. When the great danger hung 
over him he declared that legions of angels 
waited his call. But they waited in vain. 
When some called him an impostor and 
challenged him to the proof by one sign, he 
would not vindicate himself, but shut his 
power in. Even at the last he would not 
come down from the cross nor lessen its 
torture one whit lest there be a stain on his 
selflessness. 

No excuse that it was the Saviour's privi- 
lege to use his power for his own protection 



THE MAN FKOM NAZAKETH 119 

or that its judicious exercise in such manner 
would increase his usefuhiess, or that his 
manifest superiority to the forces of evil 
would enhance the respect of the world for 
his teaching, could deceive him into avoiding 
one featherweight of the common burden of 
his times or of his task. He became flesh. 

Moreover, he was free from that secondary 
selfishness that is common among the leaders 
of men. He had no spoils of office to bestow 
upon his special friends. He gave no largess 
even to those who followed him through all 
hardship and persecution, and were to 
follow unto death. He promised rewards in 
heaven, but, although he had power to give 
rich wages on earth, he would not. With 
but two exceptions, both on the Galilsean 
lake and, probably, little needed by such 
sturdy oarsmen, he wrought no miracle for 
the special benefit of his apostles. He knew 
he could not teach them his own unselfishness 
by such indulgence. When the mother of 
two in the inner circle came asking high 
place for her sons, he dismissed the request 
as of little importance, but sublimely prom- 
ised them a part in the fellowship of his 



120 THE MASTER QUEST 

sufferings. And when Peter came saying, 
"Master, what shall we receive, we who 
have left all for thee?" he answered with a 
tenderly humorous irony of the impossible, 
"Why, Peter, ten thousand per cent on your 
investment in every way — with persecutions." 

But for the blind and for the maimed and 
for lepers crying with bitter voices, "Un- 
clean! Unclean!" and for outcasts and an 
unnamed widow and an alien woman, for 
despised beggars and men possessed of devils, 
and for a captain in the oppressor's army, 
and even for one of the mob who came to 
murder him, he poured out his power without 
stint. For himself, nothing; for his close 
friends, very little; for strangers and for 
those who could never repay, such an abun- 
dance of starry deeds that their distinction is 
lost in a blessed Milky Way of compassionate 
healing. 

How human was Jesus in the quality of 
his selflessness! For we all, sometimes, are 
truly selfless. We sing a strain now and 
again in the key of the Master. Therefore 
we are able to understand this fashion of life. 
But horw unique he was in the degree of his 



THE MAN FROM NAZARETH 121 

unselfishness! With him it was not an 
occasional note or phrase, but the inclusive 
melody of his life. It was not a mere gleam 
or a broken reflection, but a constant and 
perfect sunshine. 

We are ashamed when we think how far 
off we follow our Lord in this selflessness. 
It is true that we readily condemn that 
gross greediness that transgresses our con- 
ventional manners. We somewhat vaguely 
arraign the savage clutching after honor and 
power that fills the horrible, hollow places 
under thrones with iron-shattered dead men. 
We are beginning to detect a moral opiate in 
modern commerce that changes kind men in 
residence into wholesale murderers in ab- 
sentia. The subtler selfishness that wears 
Pharisaic robes of comparison, giving thanks 
that it is not so bad as some; that draws 
lines of money-caste and loves pedigrees, 
forgetting that we are all the offspring of 
God; that exaggerates the duty of caring for 
its own, thereby compounding a sovereign 
salve for a hurt conscience; that, with the gift, 
bargains shrewdly for the blessings due the 
giver, emulating Jacob — this cultured self- 



122 THE MASTER QUEST 

love we are sometimes able to perceive in 
other people. We war murderously, we 
traffic greedily, we bawl our national anthems 
in a frenzy of pewter patriotism, more con- 
cerned about our material prosperity than 
the accomplishment of our world-mission; 
we seat our friends at our tables and ourselves 
in due turn at their boards, smiling a bit un- 
comfortably at times over the advice of a 
certain Peasant to the effect that we have 
for our guests the poor and the maimed and 
the blind and the destitute. For these, we 
have institutions where they are cared for 
cheaply and scientifically and efficiently, and, 
above all, in such a fashion as will prevent 
any interference with our happiness by the 
obtrusion of contrasting fortunes. What 
curtains of explanation we hang between the 
Master and these "least brethren" of his! 
Only now and then the breath of the Spirit 
lifts the corners a little, and then how hastily 
we run to fasten them down more securely! 

We worship the Carpenter of mean, little 
Nazareth in ornate churches. We are aided 
in our praises by deep-toned organs and 
mellow- voiced choirs. Able preachers play 



THE MAN FKOM NAZAEETH 123 

upon our emotions with dulcet oratory until 
our heartstrings sing with aeolian music. 
Then, when we have sufficiently pampered 
our aesthetic selfishness, we go to our pleasant 
homes feeling delightfully religious. After- 
ward the great doors are closed and the costly 
piles are left to edify with their splendid 
architecture, Gothic or Roman or Norman, 
the restless multitudes that cry for food and 
justice and cheer and comradeship. Did 
not the Master once say a word about the 
father whose son asked for bread and received 
a stone .^ 

Music and oratory and architecture have 
their values, but are worse than worthless as 
substitutes for that plain brotherliness of 
Jesus in which the gift is measured by what 
the giver has left. How our princely bene- 
factors would shrink if weighed in such a 
scale! And how many humble folk would 
find themselves crowned for the love and 
sacrifice bound up in their little gifts of 
money and of service! For there are not a 
few who are walking along the Inasmuch 
Road with a strange and tender glory in their 
faces. There are others who are learning 



124 THE MASTER QUEST 

slowly, yet learning, that losing is saving in 
life matters. And the Man is very patient 
with us. Yet in spite of these for whom we 
thank God, when we consider this vast, 
interlaced, clinging web of world-selfishness, 
we wonder far more than at any miracle of 
his that Jesus moved among men unhindered 
by any cord of self-love. 

But this altruism of Jesus is no greater 
marvel than is the simplicity with which he 
did his mightiest deeds. How sharply that 
stands out against the ordinary habits of 
men ! For we are fond of doing great things 
in ostentatious ways. Laws are engrossed in 
brave, black characters and are so burdened 
with labyrinthine phraseology that simple 
folk must hire one to interpret. Corner 
stones are laid with much acclaim and 
buildings are dedicated with ceremonial 
display. The young men who graduate 
from our higher schools must have the fact 
certified upon choice parchment delivered 
into their hands with sonorous words. To 
scholars is given the privilege to dignify their 
persons with odd caps and gorgeous robes 
and to honor their cognomens with talismanic 



THE MAN FKOM NAZAKETH 125 

initials behind and full names before. Fra- 
ternities have resounding titles for their or- 
ganizations and for the officers thereof. 
Kings must be crowned with much pomp, 
and Presidents inaugurated with high dis- 
play. Great events must be removed from 
the humdrum of everyday and made notable 
in trappings of glory. None need find fault 
with all this, for we all, as opportunity 
affords, go and do likewise. It is not wise 
to cry, "Sour grapes," at dignities beyond 
our reach. Ostentation is just our childlike, 
human way. 

But Jesus was different. When he wrought 
deeds of surpassing wonder, he placed about 
them no more ceremony than we grant to the 
routine of the most ordinary day. He gave a 
sudden glory of sight to one born blind; he 
opened deaf ears to the many-toned music 
of the singing world; his touch made the loath- 
some flesh of the leper as sweet and firm as 
that of a barefoot boy; his hands multiplied 
the loaves for a wondering multitude; his 
word startled the dead so that they lifted 
their weary hds and spoke. Yet he did it all 
as simply as we direct an inquirer with 



126 THE MASTER QUEST 

pointed finger and brief sentence, or wash the 
face of a child, or set food before a hungry 
friend, or say a word of cheer to a tired man. 

John, after years of meditation, places the 
raising of Lazarus at the climax of Jesus's 
miracles. The brother of Mary was the 
Master's friend; he had been dead four 
days; many critical Jews were present. 
Moreover, Jesus had obviously purposed 
that this should be a conclusive sign, since he 
waited after he heard of Lazarus' sickness 
until his friend had been some time dead. 

Yet how simple was the whole wonderful 
outputting of power! Just a word of prayer, 
quiet as a petition for daily bread, a simple 
command to those who stood by, "Roll ye 
away the stone;" then came that dominant 
utterance so strangely like the creative 
speech of God. Only this was the word of 
a friend, simple, hearty, expectant — "Laz- 
arus, come forth!" Outside the tomb waited 
the commonplace day, white with the glare 
of the sun. The awed silence of the little 
group was cut across sharply with the cry of 
a bird and accentuated by the distant call of 
a plowman. Within, there was cool darkness. 



THE MAN FKOM NAZAEETH 127 

then a stir, a misty shape, a white form 
stooping through the low door, and "Lazarus 
came forth." With the same simpHeity 
Jesus might have stopped before his friend's 
house in the village and called him forth for 
a word of greeting. 

This was the ordinary way of the Man. 
Just a word, the laying on of strong hands, 
the touch of a garment hem, a washing in the 
Siloam pool, a mere declaration of fact, ''Thy 
son liveth," and the marvels were done. 
His baptism for the mighty task, his conflict 
in the wilderness for the saving of a race, his 
call of the twelve to a matchless apostleship, 
the institution of the memorial rite that should 
outlive the centuries, his sweetly reasonable 
defiance of Pilate, his agony in the garden, 
his death on Calvary, and his resurrection, 
with its wondrous, age-long joy, were all so 
free from high ceremony that even its absence 
is not suggested. 

This is very different from our custom, and 
yet it is fundamentally human. We bedizen 
the things we think are great with cloth of 
gold and blare of horns only because we are 
immature and self-conscious. When, rising 



128 THE MASTER QUEST 

to the supreme moments of life, we forget 
ourselves, then do we approach the simpHeity 
of Jesus. The deep promise of love, the 
deeds of heroic sacrifice, the handclasp of un- 
utterable sympathy, the last words at the 
edge of life, the tears at the graveside, all 
have about them a simplicity that makes our 
most elaborate ceremonies tawdry and in- 
significant. So comes Jesus directly into 
the presence chamber of the soul with a 
message of eternal life. No gold-laced robes 
or labored speech could be appropriate to his 
tidings or to him or to us who supremely 
welcome God. All must be as unadorned 
as light. Because the tidal meanings of his 
deeds swept him away from all thought of 
form he was able to do them simply. But 
our wonder is not less. 

In His words no less than in his life does 
the Man stand forth preeminent. True, the 
world has never been without its teachers. 
The Book of the Dead, studied beside the 
generous Nile; the Code of Hammurabi, 
reverenced in high-walled Babylon; the Ve- 
das, honored in mystic India; the terse, 
ossifying wisdom of Confucius; the mighty 



THE MAN FKOM NAZARETH 129 

struggle of Job after the truth hid in a bitter 
life; the keen questions of Socrates; the noble 
maxims of Aurelius are treasures in the 
world's coffers for which we owe the givers 
many thanks. These messages differ much 
among themselves, yet they all may be put 
in one group over against the teaching of 
Jesus. His gospel in its essential elements 
is farther from them all than they are from 
one another. The Teacher of Galilee stands 
alone. 

As with his deeds, so with his words — 
their uniqueness lies not so much in what he 
said as in the manner of his utterance. 
Three qualities of truth that we are apt to 
minimize he emphasizes. Our philosophies 
ordinarily expand into vacuous abstractions. 
They draw away from the tangible fact to 
the imponderable principle, from the thing 
we see to the truth we hold uncertainly by 
its symbol. To be of use the solid values 
in them must be precipitated. And this 
condensation is a delicate and diflScult task. 
It requires that the one who makes the 
application be wiser than he who evolves the 
philosophy, for it is ever easier to propound 



130 THE MASTER QUEST 

a general principle than to make it aptly fit 
the particular instance. 

Jesus begins by making his philosophy 
particular and intensely concrete. He has 
left to theologians the vastly easier task of 
expansion. Other teachers adumbrate com- 
mon truths until they appear like ''trees 
walking," but when he speaks, we ''see all 
things clearly." His words are so vitally 
concrete that when a man comes into con- 
tact with one of them he is startled wide 
awake by the solidity of it and is gripped 
by the life in it. It becomes almost an 
axiom in its compelling obviousness. 

Though all Jesus's teaching possesses this 
quality, it is found in the most marked degree 
in his parables. When he would teach the 
eternal value of character and life content, 
he told about ten girls waiting for the wedding 
procession to arrive. As the silent hours 
passed, drowsiness pressed down upon them 
and they all slept. Suddenly — for all life 
tests come suddenly — the cry arose, "The 
bridegroom cometh." Five of the virgins 
were prepared, but the others found them- 
selves shut out from the festivities for their 



THE MAN FKOM NAZAKETH 131 

fatal unreadiness. We may seek all we 
please to excuse the careless girls, we may 
weep with them as they plead, 

**Have we not heard the Bridegroom is so sweet! 
O let us in, though late, to kiss his feet; 
O let us in, O let us in, though late, to kiss his feet.*' 

But we must see that the Teacher, tenderly 
piteous, has set forth in vivid concreteness 
the bitter law of the closed door. 

When he desires to reveal the simple worth 
and the universal quality of ordinary neigh- 
borliness, he tells of a despised Samaritan 
who had mercy in a most practical fashion 
upon a robbed and beaten Jew heartlessly 
passed by on the part of his own countrymen. 
Therein is ample illustration and authority 
for all our complicated endeavors at social 
service. From that breach in caste walls 
may well come forth the philosophy of 
internationalism. It is the creed of every 
Abou Ben Adhem, "who loves his fellow 
men.'^ None can ever measure what the 
world owes to that unnamed wayfarer who 
made the road down to Jericho an age- 
reverenced shrine of blessed pity. 



132 THE MASTER QUEST 

When he would place the untarnished gold 
of the spiritual over against the superficial 
glitter of the material, he draws with a few 
deft strokes a rich man feasting while a 
beggar lies at his door half dead. The one 
fares sumptuously and lolls at his dainty 
ease. The other feeds on broken leavings, 
and only by the pity of the dogs are his 
wounds cleansed. Dives is satisfied in his 
luxury. He "has his good things" and rests 
content therewith. Lazarus out of his mis- 
ery gropes after God. With what a graphic 
sentence Jesus paints the climax! "The 
angels carry Lazarus into the bosom of 
Abraham; the rich man died and was buried." 
What else could be done with him.^ But, in 
the farther reach of his life, he in turn becomes 
the beggar. Still true to the key of his 
character in his extremity, he can think of 
no boon save the material, be it so small, 
even, as a drop of water. His condemnation 
and the gulf fixed between him and his hap- 
piness is found in this, that the things he 
chose as his good were not worthy and could 
not abide. 

Into that quick, vital sketch is crowded 



THE MAN FEOM NAZAEETH 133 

more truth concerning things and souls and 
their mutual relations than can be found in 
many a portly volume of our scholarly 
abstractions. 

In like manner, all the Master's parables 
bloom with perennial beauty and bear con- 
tinual fruit of blessing for every generation. 
This ability to make the general truth vivid 
with the particular instance, to circumscribe 
great principles within the narrow limits of ob- 
jective speech, to so crowd the infinite verities 
into every day that all common things flash 
and glow with the profound glories of the 
Divine mind — this power to crystallize vast 
philosophies is the sign manual of the Master 
Teacher. The common people hear him 
gladly, for he has a clear word for them; yet 
the sages of all nations bow before the 
supremacy of his wisdom. 

Men are exceedingly slow to appreciate 
the greatness of the simple. They are apt 
to insist that weight of thought must involve 
obscurity of utterance. Not infrequently 
they make the far more stupid mistake of 
concluding that obscurity of word implies 
the very quintessence of wisdom. Much un- 



134 THE MASTER QUEST 

speakable nonsense is palmed off on un- 
thinking folk as profound philosophy and 
exalted religion under cover of an opaque 
and voluminous style. But Jesus links with 
the solid concreteness of his teaching a re- 
markable simplicity of statement. 

He never spoke of things uncommon in his 
time and his country. The sea with its fish, 
the fields in their carpet of lilies, a farmer 
going forth to sow, women busy with house- 
hold tasks, men engaged in business, the 
weather signs — such common symbols became 
the familiar vehicles that carried to his 
hearers the simple, glad tidings about the 
fatherly goodness of God and the brotherly 
kindness of men. His parables, as reading 
lessons, belong in the third grade; as sermons, 
they appeal to the most ordinary man; as 
philosophies, they stand on the very crest of 
the ranges of thought where the air is free 
from the dust of words. There is in all the 
sayings of Jesus the exhilaration of the high- 
land ozone and the far outlook of the moun- 
tain peaks. Or they are like the sea. Chil- 
dren may play at its edge and feel vast 
meanings that they cannot know. Ships may 



THE MAN FROM NAZARETH 135 

voyage far out on its deeps. They are as 
vital as the singing wind of the hills, and in 
them abide the sublime tides of the sea. 
The primal simplicities of good and evil, 
of repentance and faith, of life and death, of 
the rubbish fires of Gehenna for those who 
are finally perverse and the sweet countryside 
of paradise for those who are faithful in well- 
doing, of love and prayer and forgiveness and 
service — these formed the warp and the woof 
of his message to the men of his day. And 
there is nothing more profound than these. 
Mountaineers and sailors have solemn depths 
in their eyes. They are far-visioned and see 
things hid from other folk. So those who 
dwell among the simple heights and far 
distances of Jesus's words come into clear 
seeing even in the murk of this life and are 
more and more aware of God. 

Men cannot think the simple thoughts of 
Jesus after him without appreciating more 
fully the wonders of the common day. They 
will recognize as never otherwise the sublime 
worth of ordinary honesty and daily cheer- 
fulness, of impartial courtesy, of humble 
industry, and of plain common sense. For 



136 THE MASTEE QUEST 

them the hidden valleys and the dusty roads, 
the silence of the hills and the noise of the 
streets, the laughter of children and the sob- 
bing of men and women will all lay hold 
upon the unutterably profound. Tennyson 
so quaintly sings the profoundness of the 
commonplace : 

"Flower in the crannied wall, 
I pluck you out of the crannies, 
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand; 
Little flower, if I could but understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all 
I should know what God and man is." 

The English poet said the word, but the 
Galilsean Poet said it long before him and 
flashed into his heart its inspiration. 

Nothing startles us more than the em- 
phasis that Jesus places on the inherent and 
irresistible immortality of truth. Men feel 
that the verities which they proclaim must 
be sustained with close-knit logic, enforced 
with somewhat of compulsion, perpetuated 
through careful records, promulgated by 
high enthusiasm. Otherwise, they fear that 
the truth will not be accepted, or that it will 
be destroyed, or that it will be forgotten, or 
that it will remain forever within the narrow 



THE MAN FEOM NAZARETH 137 

circle which circumscribes its first proclama- 
tion. Being but coast-wise voyagers with 
poor ships and faulty instruments, shut in 
by fogs and headlands, these precautions, 
perhaps, are well taken. Our errors, being 
many, do seriously handicap the truth with 
which they are mixed. But Jesus never 
seemed so concerned. He said that seed 
cast into the ground would grow, first, the 
blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the 
ear. And he wrought that persuasion into 
all his work. He spent very little thought 
on the perpetuation of his message. That 
power lay in the word itself. Once revealed, 
nothing can by any chance destroy or im- 
prison truth. So the Teacher^s only care was 
to make the gospel plain. 

He never sought audiences, nor did he 
keep his greatest sayings for the multitudes 
that came unsought. Most of his wonderful 
parables were spoken almost incidentally to 
the few, whatever hearers were at hand. He 
seemed most careless about the exact preser- 
vation of his words. He wrote no manu- 
scripts, nor did he even suggest that those 
who heard should hold the words in mind. 



138 THE MASTEK QUEST 

He trusted the glad tidings to their own 
essential fitness and to the ever-present 
Spirit of Truth. He never questioned what 
we are so loath to believe — that the soul of 
man has an indestructible aflSnity for truth. 
Therefore, he was not concerned that his mes- 
sage should be recorded, or even remembered. 
The great burden upon him constantly was 
that he should be understood. So he became 
flesh and wrought miracles, and taught and 
died and rose again from the dead to the end 
that the sluggish minds and slow hearts of 
those who saw and heard might perceive and 
realize the good news. Very significant are 
those words, "When he, the Spirit of Truth, 
is come, he will guide you into all truth'' — as 
though to enter into truth was the only really 
necessary thing. Abiding therein he takes 
for granted. This is the mind of the Master, 
vividly concrete, profoundly simple, confi- 
dently faithful to the overlordship of truth. 

Even more kingly than his deeds and his 
words is his power over men. For things 
and thoughts are ever less than folks. What- 
ever he did or uttered was for the sake of his 
brothers. And how they acknowledged his 



THE MAN FKOM NAZAKETH 139 

kingliness! There was Simon, who after- 
ward found a better name. He heard the 
Man speak only twice or thrice until he was 
willing to leave all and to follow him where 
and to what end he knew not. Simon Peter 
was impulsive, but James was a very practical, 
cool-headed man of affairs. Yet, without 
hesitation, he too left property and occupa- 
tion to become the disciple of One who had 
only poverty and hardship and danger to 
offer. Thomas, through the fog of his 
pessimism, felt the warmth of the Master's 
heart and rose up and went after him even 
unto death. Nicodemus, with his honest 
pride of learning, sat at the feet of this 
''Teacher sent of God" and was willing to 
learn his alphabet again. Afterward he was 
glad to risk much in order to show to the 
poor, broken body of this wonderful Gali- 
laean the last tokens of love. Fat Pilate 
trembled in the Spirit-vibrant presence of 
this strange, unfearful Carpenter. Thrilled 
by the sublimity of his death, even the 
harsh Roman executioner cried out, "Truly 
this man was the Son of God." 
Nor was Jesus's power limited to those 



140 THE MASTEE QUEST 

who looked upon his face in the flesh. Out 
from the ranks of the Jews, in spite of their 
devotion to the ancient law, came hosts of 
faithful disciples; from the schools of the 
Greeks and the proud camps and courts of 
Rome came forth men to love and worship 
Jesus and to die for his name's sake. Down 
the centuries winds the long procession of 
martyrs who loved him more than life; of 
missionaries who counted all things but 
refuse that they might, like Paul, do the task 
given them and share in the fellowship of his 
sufferings; of high souls aflame with enthu- 
siasm for the Man and caught by his genius 
into the seventh heaven of art and music 
and oratory, into glories of militant righteous- 
ness and prophetic statecraft. 

The rich and the poor, the baron and the 
peasant, the scholar and the unlettered man, 
find their differences grow small in the 
sacred likeness of their discipleship. He 
draws all men unto him and teaches them 
brotherhood through himself to one another. 
Even nations that have drifted down diver- 
gent valleys since the first days of the race 
are swept together by their unity in him. 



THE MAN FEOM NAZARETH 141 

They are learning to share the rich freightage 
gathered on their diififerent roads and are 
putting the shoulder under each other's 
burdens. Through their inexpKeable devo- 
tion to a Jewish peasant crucified two 
thousand years ago, the men who are shaping 
the world's history of to-day and giving di- 
rection to the centuries that shall be are com- 
manded more and more by him. The Man of 
Galilee is moving steadily toward the accom- 
plishment of his world-wide kingdom dream. 
Nowhere is Jesus's mastery over men more 
clearly acknowledged than in the tributes he 
has won from those accounted his enemies. 
Julian, the Apostate, cried from his field of 
death, "O thou Galilsean, thou hast con- 
quered." The words find their echo in the 
lines of Swinburne, who shows that he mis- 
understands the quality of Jesus, but that 
he feels his power aright. 

"Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilaean, 
The world is growing gray with thy breath." 

Renan, in an eloquent appreciation, says, 
^'Whatever surprises the future may hold, 
Jesus will never be surpassed." Rous- 



142 THE MASTER QUEST 

seau compared the Jewish Teacher with 
the Greek philosopher in their deaths: 
"Socrates died Kke a philosopher; Jesus 
Christ, like a God." That dominant Jewish 
statesman, Disraeli, caught a glimpse of his 
Compatriot's empire and uttered this Hebrew 
strain of prophecy, "Has not Jesus conquered 
Europe and changed its name to Christen- 
dom? All countries that refuse the cross 
wither. The time will come when the vast 
communities of America and Australia v^ill 
find music in the songs of Zion and solace 
in the parables of Galilee." Napoleon, that 
great knower of men, on a quiet, starlit night, 
came out of the deeps of profound meditation 
and uttered a sentence wherein lies much of 
the secret of Jesus's mastership, "Alexander, 
Charlemagne, and I have founded great 
empires. But upon what have we built the 
creations of our genius? Upon sheer force. 
Jesus, alone, dared to found his empire upon 
love, and to-night millions would die for 
him." He is the King of the world. 

The mere hint just given of the reason lor 
His power over men is hardly suflBcient. 
The fact deserves analysis. Three qualities 



THE MAN FEOM NAZAEETH 143 

make Jesus imperial. First, there is his own 
evident manliness. He was never hard nor 
reserved, neither ice nor steel. He entered 
heartily into life as it surged around him 
with its twisted currents of joy and sorrow. 
He wept over Jerusalem when he saw the 
city beloved going in headstrong blindness 
to its utter destruction. Yet, with true 
catholicity, he rejoiced over the unexpected 
faith of an Itahan centurion as when one 
finds a violet in a rocky place. When the 
little ones came crowding about his knees he 
straightway forgot grown-up matters and ran 
back into the summerland of his own child- 
hood. He wakened to a sudden love at the 
sight of a young man questing the perfect life; 
he was roused to a blazing indignation by 
the wicked hypocrisy of those Pharisees who 
made the sacred robes of the faith they were 
set to guard the cloak for their iniquity; 
when he met the weeping widow of Nain his 
tender heart could not wait even a moment 
for the hand of resurrection power to touch 
the bier^ but must say at once, ''Weep not." 
He was in no fashion unhuman nor lifted 
above the many-toned melodies of our 



144 THE MASTER QUEST 

emotions. The music of all men's hearts 
found echo in his breast. 

But in all these things he was masculine. 
He never whined in self-pity or posed as a 
martyr. He never eflfervesced in aimless 
sentimentalities nor lost his self-control in 
ebullitions of wrath. Always he maintained 
perfect poise. Defeat never cast him down 
nor did victory unduly elate him. When 
the Jewish zealots came to make him king 
he stole away from their kindly force. But 
under the shadow of the cross he spoke 
calmly of the time when his authority should 
be proclaimed throughout the world. His 
untrembling confidence in the ultimate tri- 
umph of the cause arose from his assurance 
that true manliness is the mightiest thing 
in the world. He knew that a man* sent of 
God to a task must suflFer temporary defeat, 
for the magnitude of the work will be worthy 
the man. But he never doubted final suc- 
cess, since a man consecrating himself to a 
God-given task is greater than all events. 
The gates of hell cannot prevail against him. 
This double manliness of broad and tender 
sympathies and of confident poise drew 



THE MAN FEOM NAZAKETH 145 

strong men to him as the magnet draws the 
steel. 

The second element of Jesus's power over 
men lies in his constant recognition of man- 
liness as their most precious possession. He 
never pauperizes us by offering something 
for nothing. True, he comes with his hands 
full of gifts. He bears away the burden of 
our guilt, breaks the fetters of sin, and shows 
us the kindly face of the Father. He 
strengthens our hearts with the courage of 
his comradeship and thrills us with the far- 
blowing winds of eternal life. He gives with 
marvelous liberality, unbargainingly, with the 
joy of perfect friendship. But, with never a 
thought of what he has given, he asks largely. 
Being forgiven, we must be holy in all our 
deeds and thoughts; seeing the Father's face, 
we must offer to him the most perfect service, 
not for wrath, but for love's sake. Jesus 
offers us his fellowship, but he ardently 
desires ours. He lifts on our tasks, but, with 
unquestioning confidence, he expects us to 
put our hands beside his own in the redemp- 
tion of the world. He brings us eternal life, 
yet the emphasis is not on its privileges, but 



U6 THE MASTER QUEST 

upon its responsibilities. He gave himself 
to save our lives, but the very essence of this 
salvation is a willingness to lose them for 
him. It is altogether in harmony with his 
whole message that the prodigal should feed 
swine and live on swine food until he came 
to himseK and started back home to begin go- 
ing right where he began going wrong. One of 
the ancient Armagh manuscripts gives an 
added touch to the young man's worthiness 
by substituting for the softened confession 
the more rugged word, "I am not fit to be 
thy slave.'' The prodigal received forgive- 
ness only when in his heart he was worth 
redeeming. Jesus insists on manliness. 

It is blessedly true that the Master does not 
judge us and our deserts as the world judges. 
His measurement of our worthiness is based 
"Not on the vulgar mass called 'work.' " He 
goes tenderly and wisely deeper until, in that 
judgment, each of us is able to say, 

"But all the world's coarse thumb 
And finger failed to plumb. 

So passed in making up the main account; 
All instincts immature. 
All purposes unsure. 

That weighed not as work yet swelled the 
man's amount; 



THE MAN FEOM NAZARETH 147 

Thoughts hardly to be packed 
Into a narrow act. 

Fancies that broke through language and 
escaped; 
All I could never be. 
All, men ignored in me. 

This, I was worth to God." 

But, finally, we can stand upright in 
sturdy self-respect and say, "This that I have 
received, this also I have deserved/' 

His large expectations of service from us 
emphasizes still further his faith in our man- 
liness. The old legend has it that when 
Jesus returned to heaven Gabriel met him 
and asked about the extension of his kingdom. 
The Man made stately answer: "I told the 
message to my disciples. They are to tell it 
to others, and they to still others in their 
turn. Everyone who hears the word is to 
send it on until all the world shall hear and 
believe." But the angel protested : "Suppose 
some generation of hearers should fail you, 
and the telling cease .f^ What provision have 
you made for such a failure.^" The wonder- 
ful answer came quick: "I have made no 
provision against the failure of these men. I 
am depending on them.'' How can we 



148 THE MASTER QUEST 

disappoint such a trust? And how can we 
fall below the majestic proportions which he 
takes for granted in the recorded test of dis- 
cipleship, "If any man will come after me, 
let him deny himseK, and take up his cross 
daily, and follow me." As steel rings to 
clashing steel comes back from the men of 
us, "We will follow thee, Master, whither- 
soever thou goest.'' 

The third element in this power of his has 
been thought about and talked about and 
sung about and leaned on and lived in and 
died for in such bursting measures through the 
centuries that the merest reference here will 
bring all its mellow glories before us, as 
though one were to say with hand upswung 
to the color-dappled sky, "See, the sunset!" 
— that big, obvious man's love that filled 
the three years of his ministry, and that has 
been brimming over the world ever since, wins 
men's hearts to him. We hear much of its 
tactfulness, of its wisdom, of its tenderness, 
of its sacrificial devotion. But one quality 
in it that is not so often emphasized, amazes 
me. Somehow, without a suspicion of flat- 
tery and so quietly that we hardly realize it. 



THE MAN FROM NAZARETH 149 

he makes us feel that he sees something so 
infinitely fine in us that we, by its virtue, 
become worth redeeming at even the highest 
cost. The assurance that he counts us pre- 
cious, that he will be the poorer without us, 
that he will sadly miss us if we persist in 
losing ourselves, stirs our self-respect into 
mighty life. We conclude that, since he 
thinks so, we must be too good to be wasted. 
So this seeing love brings us to him, men who 
have great needs to be supplied and great 
sins to be forgiven, but who also are thrilling 
with the splendid, royal joy of possessing 
something worth the saving and the giving. 
Such a wonderful love is his ! 

I remember a very blessed story of a strong, 
worldly, self-centered man who chanced to 
see in a friend's private oflSce one day Hof- 
mann's "Boy Christ.'' He looked wistfully 
back at it as he passed from the room. 
After a little time he returned and looked at 
it again and yet again. Then his friend gave 
him the key to the office and went out leaving 
him alone with that luminous face. An 
hour passed. What those eyes and that 
face said to him, what unworthy ambitions 



150 THE MASTER QUEST 

were consumed in that quiet room, what new 
aspirations were born, what seismic read- 
justments took place in the depths of the man, 
none can say. But as he went forth, a 
twice-born man with wisps of angel music 
entangled in his voice and on his face "the 
Ught that never was on sea or land," he 
uttered that old word that is always so 
strangely new, "The Boy has conquered." 



THE FRIENDSHIP ROAD 

We have gone far afield and have been 
thinking, however inadequately, about some 
spacious themes. Now we come directly to 
an inquiry that has been with us from the 
beginning of the quest. It is very common- 
place and very profound: "What is the vital 
heart of a Christian experience?'' The an- 
swer has been intimated a score of times. 
The words about man's half-conscious re- 
sponse to the surrounding God and his 
demand for life-room was its prophecy. The 
message concerning sin, the atonement, and 
out-reaching faith gave to the question and 
to the answer sharper definition. The won- 
dering studies of the Son of God who became 
the Son of man gathered the interrogation 
about a Person and intimated that he was 
the answer. The Friendship Road runs 
through the answer, as the Master phrases 
it, to the end of the quest, as simple and as 
beautiful as a country lane. Hear the 

151 



152 THE MASTER QUEST 

Teacher as he utters the words ever so 
quietly, "Ye are my friends/' 

These are marvelous words, but our study 
of them must have the simplicity of the 
brook by the way, for the Master is never 
abstruse. Yet what is said must not be 
trivial, like the liquid chatter of the stream, 
for he is always profound. When we are 
tired of philosophies and theologies, we may 
leave their tangled thickets and come out 
into the open where God^s stars shine. 
There, after we wait a bit to catch the beat 
of the Infinite, we will see the wonderful 
Christ with his hands stretched out in warm 
friendliness. In a strange and peaceful 
fashion, quite beyond intellectual explana- 
tion, he will become to us The Way, beside 
which all other ways are only winding trails 
beginning and ending nowhere; The Truth, 
of which all other verities are but broken 
reflections; The Life, which sweeps oceanic 
about the time-locked bay of the w^orld. As 
we put our hands in his in all our tangled 
work and play, we enter upon the Friendship 
Road and are satisfied. 

Not that theologies are useless. Since the 



THE FEIENDSHIP KOAD 153 

common consciousness of God and the accu- 
mulated knowledge of his ways with men 
find expression in them, they guide us some- 
what into our own mystic experiences. But 
the science of railway transportation belongs 
to engineers and conductors, not to the 
passengers; the science of building is for 
carpenters, not for those who Kve in houses; 
the science of physiology is for physicians, 
not for common folk who enjoy good health 
in blissful ignorance of the processes back of 
it. So the intricacies of theology are for 
those specially trained and equipped for the 
task. Common folk must take their doc- 
trines ready made and prove their correctness 
by their consequences. They must make the 
venture and justify their daring by the result. 
And this is Christ's way, for he is ever urging 
people to seek the experience first and ac- 
count for it afterward if possible. The 
peculiar essence of faith lies in the boldness 
of its leap beyond the known. Jesus did 
not meet the father's cry for his son, "If 
thou canst do anything!" with arguments 
proving his abihty. He simply thrust the 
issue back. "If thou canst! All things are 



154 THE MASTEE QUEST 

possible to him that dares.'' Then he 
healed the lad and left the father to his 
logic. The supreme thing is the unspeakable 
comradeship with the Christ. Afterward, if 
we desire, we may give attention to its 
explanation. 

Abstractly, we may be interested in the 
incarnation as a problem to be solved. 
Practically, we are satisfied to believe that 
God in Jesus Christ drew near our humanity, 
entered into our essential experiences, and 
forever remains one of us. And the warmth 
and color that come thus into our religious 
life justifies the venture. In the hour of our 
surrender we gave little thought to the 
doctrine of the atonement. We only dared 
to believe that God for Christ's sake forgave 
our sins. The deep peace that followed con- 
vinced us that we did not believe amiss. 
We are not greatly concerned about the 
historical evidences of the resurrection. We 
venture to believe the story of the empty 
tomb, and so we enter into a comradeship 
that is proof enough. The science of theo- 
logy is never equal to the practice of theology. 
The flowers of grace and the fruit of the Spirit 



THE FEIENDSHIP KOAD 155 

are the best proofs of religious truth. And 
these we find only in the words that Jesus 
said long ago, "Ye are my friends/' and in 
the answers we have been making each for 
himself ever since: "Yes, Lord, we are thy 
friends/' 

Some sayings are of little consequence. 
They are like toy magnets that serve merely 
to pick up tacks or draw tiny ducks across 
miniature ponds. We are continually wearied 
with an ephemeral literature, a volatile ora- 
tory, a puerile science. But Jesus never says 
an insignificant thing. Massive, swift power 
characterizes all his utterances. Every word 
from his lips has a sudden glory and an 
irresistible force. 

Sometimes one of the Master's phrases 
gleams like a sword — "Ye whited sepulchers." 
Sometimes it is redolent with fragrance like a 
dewy rose — "She loved much." Again it 
blooms with the lilies of hope — "In my 
Father's house." Through some of the 
Teacher's sentences sweeps the virile frank- 
ness of a March wind — "If it were not so, I 
would have told you." Now and then 
there is wrung from his courageous heart a 



156 THE MASTER QUEST 

cry that throbs with agony — "Could ye not 
watch with me one hour?" Incidental 
clauses open wide vistas — "Wheresoever this 
gospel is preached," and then the imperial 
parenthesis, "in the whole world." So we 
are able to sing after such a prophecy, 

"Jesus shall reign where'er the sun 
Doth his successive journeys run; 
His kingdom spread from shore to shore 
Till moons shall wax and wane no more." 

Nor is the sentence about friendship with 
him an exception. On the contrary, it goes 
beyond most in its weight of significance. 
So vast and various are its implications that 
we would need eternity to tell them all. We 
will need eternity to know them all. What 
John said so naively about the works of 
Jesus might be literally true of these words 
and their implications: "If they should be 
written every one, I suppose that even the 
world itself could not contain the books." 

Jesus said, "Ye are my friends," so there 
must be likeness of nature and possibility 
between the Man and men. We did not 
think we were so great. But it must be so. 



THE FRIENDSHIP EOAD 157 

for no friendship can accompany fundamental 
unlikeness. You may admire a rose for its 
beauty, and treasure it till its petals are all 
but dust because of its precious associations, 
but there can be no friendship between you 
and the rose. The suggestion is absurd. 
You are unlike it in nature and possi- 
bility. 

Such delightful sentiment gathers about a 
man and his faithful dog that we are tempted 
to call their mutual liking by the name of 
friendship. But, if we speak seriously, the 
word is altogether too rich in its inclusions to 
indicate the mere corner in man's possible 
life open to his loyal retainer. They can be 
called friends only by the grace of colloquial 
freedom or poetic license. Rip Van Winkle 
and his dog. Wolf, were comrades of the 
domestic tribulation and the woodland pleas- 
ures. But when, in the cool forest noon, 
Rip's fancy led him through the "olden, 
golden glory of the days gone by," with their 
knightly ambitions and dreams of love, 
before he became the vagabond husband of 
a bitter shrew, the hot tears flooded his eyes 
and his heart ached hard. Meanwhile Wolf 



158 THE MASTEK QUEST 

sniffed at a promising burrow or lay snapping 
flies in a patch of yellow sunshine. The 
hunter had entered only the fringe of his 
possibilities, but he had left his dog far 
behind. They could be comrades in the 
chase, but never friends. Their differences 
were too deeply wrought. 

Friendship, it is true, is not a matter of 
equal attainments, but of similar possibilities. 
The ripe scholar, his mind stored richly and 
skilled to the last degree, may sustain a 
satisfying friendship with an illiterate man 
because they are both thinkers. In the one 
all the intellectual possibilities are in the 
bud that have come to full fruitage in the 
other. The man who has drunk deep of life, 
who has known the clear wine of its joys and 
the bitter lees of its tragedies, may enter into 
a large friendship with a callow youth whose 
experience includes only hopes and fears and 
misty dreams. They are alike men of heart, 
and what one has drunk of joy and sorrow, 
of success and failure, of wondering hope and 
bewildered despair, the other may drain to 
the last drop. A luminous illustration is 
given by the French master. That tall man 



THE FEIENDSHIP ROAD 159 

of God, the Bishop, loved Jean Valjean, who 
was driven by the lacerations of a terrible 
injustice into a savage hatred of society. 
Valjean loved the Bishop with a saving 
veneration. This was possible because each 
might have been what the other was. Friend- 
ship need not be much hindered by difference 
of degree, but must have a basis of funda- 
mental unity. 

Surely, when the Master used the words, 
"Ye are my friends,'' he was not ignorant of 
the meaning involved. He must have per- 
ceived the implication of the common nature 
and the similar destiny. Nor does this make 
us presumptuous claimants of Deity, nor do 
we thus deny Christ's infinite oneness with 
the Father nor his personal unity. But, 
according to the old creed, which involves a 
mystery, but which is more credible without 
explanation than any explanation of the 
known facts, he who is "very God" is also 
"very man." The ancient witness of John is 
that the Word that was God "became flesh." 
Jesus also thoroughly entangled himself in the 
web of humanity by the title he chose, "The 
Son of man." In the clear completeness of 



160 THE MASTER QUEST 

this humanity we strike hands with him in an 
increasing comradeship of appreciation and 
hope. 

In his perfect humanity he is the consum- 
mate jBower of the race. We cannot compare 
him with our ideals because he gave us our 
ideals. Such comparison would be like say- 
ing that the sun is as bright as the sunshine, 
or that the ocean is as mighty as the tide. 
He illuminates life with his transcendent 
holiness and sweeps into our little world with 
the surging wonder of the infinite. Our 
friendship with him assuredly signifies this 
marvel, that the stalwart virtues and tender 
graces that were actual in his life are nascent 
in ours. Somewhere in the long march down 
the ages, here or yonder, we will come to the 
integrity of life and character that he mani- 
fested beforehand when, for a little time, he 
lived among men visible to their dim eyes. 
There we will see God's face plainly and live 
great, spotless lives like his, the Man of 
Galilee. In the meantime we will remember 
that we are his friends, men of great expec- 
tations, and so we will be held from that 
which is unbecoming our princeliness, and 



THE FRIENDSHIP EOAD 161 

so we will be inspired to all high and noble 
deeds. 

This avowal suggests instantly the con- 
stant, refluent stream of gifts between the 
Master and ourselves. For in friendship lie 
the two finest courtesies of life — a genial 
giving and a gracious receiving. Nor is one 
less worthy and delicate than the other. It 
is easy to give imperfectly, with the icy 
coldness of duty, the hard obligations of 
traflSc, the patronly condescension of an 
alms, or the low cunning of a speculation in 
generosity. But to give beautifully, as freely 
as the rain that falls alike upon the simple 
daisy and the fragrant rose, as heartily as the 
sun that shines with equal warmth upon the 
basking toad and the iridescent bird of 
paradise, is a grace possible only to a mature 
saint of God or to a little child. But to 
receive is as high and delicate an art. Its 
qualities slip through the coarse meshes of 
our speech. We know, however, that much 
generosity is chilled into selfishness by a 
harsh or crude recipiency. But now and then 
when we render a gift, its sweetly gracious 
reception, full of mingled expectation and 



162 THE MASTER QUEST 

surprise, catches us up into the rapture of the 
Master's word, "It is more blessed to give 
than to receive." And a high friendship 
requires both these graces. 

Most of all, we are the recipients of Jesus's 
gifts. His hands overflow with wealth to- 
ward us. But it is the courtesy of his 
giving rather than the abundance of his 
largess that warms our hearts. Only the 
profundities of childhood can illustrate its 
simplicity and its depth. Jimmie, the gamin, 
has found an apple, big, red-cheeked, without 
spot or blemish — a rare prize. Billie comes 
running, frankly asking a share. With no 
shadow of hesitancy the fruit is held out, and 
back of it come the words of a perfect giving: 
"Bite big. Bill. You know you're welcome." 
So our Friend is always speaking to us: 
"Come boldly to the throne of grace. You 
know you are welcome." 

We can never ask anything too great, 
since he laid down his life for our redemption. 
We can never ask anything too small, for he 
taught us to pray, "Give us this day our 
daily bread." Neither can we come too 
often, for he commends to us the importunity 



THE FRIENDSHIP ROAD 163 

of the woman before the judge and the in- 
sistence of the neighbor who would borrow a 
loaf. It seems sure that prayer is a strategy 
of love by which the wants of the body and 
the aspirings of the soul become allurements 
into his presence, so that he and we, being 
often together, may become good friends. 
If this be so, he must be very lonesome after 
some of us; we come so seldom. Since we are 
his friends, it is his joy to give largely to us. 
It is our choice privilege to complete and 
enrich that joy by receiving his gifts with 
whatever fine courtesy is possible to us. 

But a friendship must be mutual in gifts 
and service. We must give as well as receive 
if we would transform the words of Jesus into 
a vital experience; so, knowing this, the wise 
Master holds out his empty hands — our 
opportunity. He does not ask our help 
needlessly or superficially, as we sometimes 
turn to children, practicing a kindly deception 
that they may feel a happy importance. We 
are indispensable to him and to the accom- 
plishment of his desire. His incarnation, 
with its infinite surrender, his life, with its 
wealth of blessing, the unmeasured agony of 



1G4 THE MASTER QUEST 

the cross, and the ineffable glory of the resur- 
rection, will all avail nothing for the salvation 
of men except we tell the story and make the 
dream come true. It is for us to see that the 
justice ^nd grace of Jesus are wrought into 
the thought and the enthusiasms, the laws 
and the customs, the movements and the 
institutions of the race. He scattered a few 
seeds of redemption in a little corner of the 
earth, but, as a friend upon friends, he is 
depending upon us to sow the successive 
increase until the whole earth is golden in 
the abundant harvest of the kingdom of God. 
So, in expectant comradeship, he asks 
large things of us. He is not afraid to mani- 
fest an honest egotism, for he is talking to 
friends. He knows himself to be so great 
that he insists upon our organizing our 
whole lives about him as the vital, personal 
center of word and deed and motive. He 
would not simply dominate our lives; he 
would permeate them. Moreover, he looks 
beyond us to the task, and ever insists that 
his work is our work. His voice in our 
souls is not the half-heard strain of an 
seolian harp, soothing us to a comfortable 



THE FRIENDSHIP EOAD 165 

slumber, but the keen call of the trumpet, 
rousing us to desperate endeavor. He gives 
us much in making our needs and burdens 
his own; but he asks of us no less, even the 
fullest measure of self-surrender. This is 
aceording^to the custom of friendship, and 
we observe it with Jesus, not as a debt, but 
because he is our friend. 

But one of the sad things of life is that so 
many of us blunder in this matter of giving 
to him. Certainly, if our contributions of 
money and of service be merely a formal 
thing, a bit of religious manners, then with 
peaceful conscience we will follow the custom 
present in time and place. Or, if this be a 
commercial transaction, we will give as little 
and get as much as possible. In this way 
some are adept bargainers if their heavenly 
expectations fail not. If our giving be a 
cold duty, a paying of tithes much as we pay 
rent, then we will make such payment as our 
conscience requires and be satisfied. But 
we remember that we are talking about a 
friendship between the Master and us. So 
the whole situation is changed. Real friends 
are never penny-wise among themselves, but. 



166 THE MASTER QUEST 

in a delightful fashion, pound-foolish. They 
do not dole out in pinches taken reluctantly 
between the finger and the thumb, but 
bestow handfuls liberally. What a laughing 
riot of friendship rings in Paul's sentence, 
"The Lord loveth a cheerful giver!'' How 
can he help it, being a friend himself? 
Friends delight to be wasteful in generosity, 
like the woman with the alabaster box of 
ointment, very precious. The second mile 
trudged with an enemy is a stern duty; with 
a friend it becomes a blessed privilege. 

And Jesus is our Friend. We cannot be 
niggardly in our giving of money or time or 
service, but we may lose sight of him in the 
process of the gift. We may talk about his 
needs as church work or civic reform or 
benevolence. Thus we may lose sight of 
him in the dim halls of institutionalism. 
The dust of organization may hide our 
Friend from our eyes. Rann Kennedy makes 
a questioner ask "The Servant in the House" 
why he wears his Oriental robes in England. 
Sadly he replies, "Otherwise clothed, many 
would not recognize me." Sir Launfal, 
shining in his "maiden mail," flung his gold 



THE FKIENDSHIP KOAD 167 

to the beggar with a lofty generosity and saw 
only the beggar. But when, a humble and 
penniless pilgrim taught by long adversity, 
he broke his crust with one more miserable 
than himself and gave him to drink from his 
own wooden bowl in all good comradeship, 
the Lord Christ was revealed to him. Above 
the entrance of a certain church the thorn- 
crowned Christ looks out over a city in which 
much bitter misery abides. We recognize at 
a glance the image of the Man of Sympathy 
cut in the stone. But do we see with equal 
clearness those other images of him through 
the tatters of poverty and the lacerations of 
sin bestowed so carelessly by an unredeemed 
society.^ How dim of eyes and slow of heart 
are Jesus's friends before the wondrous In- 
asmuch by which the lead of compassionate 
service rendered the unlovable is transmuted 
into the gold of a gift to him ! 

There remains a more subtle and still more 
wonderful implication in this word of friend- 
ship. There is a contagion of disease and a 
contagion of character. The saloon is a 
moral pest house. It is as dangerous to 
enter into fellowship with a profligate as to 



168 THE MASTER QUEST 

dwell with a leper. The fool who says in 
his heart, "There is no God/' fool though he 
is, may start an epidemic of atheism among 
his comrades. Every argument that defends 
the quarantine of a diseased body may with 
magnified force sustain the segregation of a 
corrupt soul. The use of antitoxins suggests 
the need of life-forces that will render char- 
acter immune to common contagions. Health 
is infectious, if not of the body, yet certainly 
of the soul. General Sheridan's dashing 
gallantry at Cedar Creek spread an epidemic 
of courage through his demoralized troops. 
The devotion of Paul has been caught by 
man after man down the centuries until it has 
grown into continental infections of mission- 
ary zeal. The contagion of Savonarola's 
righteousness purified Florence. John Wes- 
ley's concern about personal holiness has been 
blown by the winds of God around the 
world. A stalwart soul breathes an atmos- 
phere of spiritual ozone that exhilarates all 
who draw near. Being born from above is 
only catching life from Jesus. The man who 
comes within the circle of his friendship is 
inoculated with the germs of high virtue. 



THE FEIENDSHIP KOAD 169 

He is nobly infected with worthiness. It is 
inevitable that we become like him when we 
walk long enough by his side to get acquainted 
and to see him as he is. 

We would never dare to claim the obverse 
of this influence of Jesus upon us were it not 
for the undeniable implication of his assertion, 
"Ye are my friends." The effects of friend- 
ship are always reciprocal. K we are changed 
by our friendship with him, it is certain that 
he is not left unchanged by his friendship 
with us. The Son of God might have dwelt 
alone through the ages, but he would not 
have been Immanuel. The Messiah might 
have ruled in solitary authority, but he 
would not have been our Friend from 
Nazareth. He not only seemed different 
because he walked with his disciples and 
sat with the common folk and took the 
little children in his arms; he became different. 
Without the friendship of men Christ would 
doubtless be perfectly what he would be in 
such a case; but he would not be perfectly 
what he is. His experience, his joy, his 
love, he, himself, finds completeness in our 
friendship. What a wonder! Our trust, 



170 THE MASTER QUEST 

service, love, our friendship, enters potently 
into the perfectly fulfilling perfectness of 
Jesus Christ. 

What words of infinite implication they 
are! "Ye are my friends." What deep 
likenesses to him they reveal, what vistas of 
hope they open, what privileges of giving 
and receiving they include, what vital shaping 
of character they indicate, and what strange 
and glorious power they offer us! Withal, 
how homely and loving and gracious they 
are! — "Ye are my friends." Yes, Lord, we 
are thy friends, thy friends. 



VI 

THE END OF THE QUEST 

Man seeks greatness, and the end of the 
quest is God. There is the last hope of 
achieving his possibiHties. If God fail him, 
only despair is left. His body binds him to 
the little earth; the utmost reach of his mind 
thrusts him against the rough walls of the 
unknowable; his heart finds bitter lees at 
the bottom of every cup of joy. Material 
goods that are of larger price than value, phi- 
losophies that clang emptily like high-sound- 
ing cymbals, powers that are as lusty and 
frail as reeds, are but the cap and bells of the 
court fool beside the crown of man's aspiring 
and unquenchable ambitions. They simu- 
late authority in the passing hour of preten- 
sion, but when life goes heavily or the quest 
becomes profound, they are cast aside and 
forgotten. 

Francis Thompson, in his majestic lines, 

tells vividly what a broken staflF every other 

support is to the man who flees away from 

God. 

171 



172 THE MASTER QUEST 

"I fled Him down the night and down the days, 
I fled Him down the arches of the years, 

I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways 
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears 

I hid from Him and under running laughter. 
Up vistaed hopes I fled 
And shot precipitated 
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears 

From those strong feet that followed, followed after. 

But with unhurried chase 

And unperturbed pace. 

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy. 

They beat — and a voice beat 

More instant than the feet — 

'All things betray thee who betrayest Me.' " 

Only as a man gathers himself into the 
spiritual focus can he see the way out. He 
lifts up his face — it is significant that we 
think God is above us — his struggling mind, 
athrill with the sublimity of the task, seizes 
some projecting crag of the Infinite; his 
heart, straining like a storm-beaten sail, 
swells with the gales of a vaster love than it 
ever knew before. So the whole man, all 
soul, clings to the feet of God crying, ''Time 
and earth imprison me! Canst Thou make 
room for me?" 

Man demands length of days for the ac- 
complishment of his long purposes and the 



THE END OF THE QUEST 173 

fulfillment of his vast expectations. This 
imperative desire arises from certain deep 
intuitions and intimates immortality. But 
in fundamentals we must know; we cannot 
rest on intimations. They form but a spider 
web spun from within ourselves and need 
outer anchorage. Unsupported, they drift 
on the shifting winds of doubt and fear. At 
the worst, this philosophy of introspection 
is a sheer guess, a bitterly flippant "Perhaps.'' 
Hardly better, it is an entrancing vision that 
may be a mirage or may be the oasis of 
abiding life. It is a beautiful dream called 
the larger hope, and held desperately as a 
mother might hold her quiet babe to her 
bosom, fearing to look in its face lest it 
be dead. Such dreamers may well pray, 
"If it be a dream, may we never waken 
from it, but dream on until we fall asleep 
forever." At its best, this expectation is 
a conclusion from incomprehensible prem- 
ises, attained by man's poor logic. How 
can a man rest his longing for time enough 
and for all the hopes that lie therein 
upon a foundation builded painfully by him- 
self. 



174 THE MASTER QUEST 

"An infant crying in the night. 
An infant crying for the light. 
And with no language but a cry." 

But the end of the quest is God. When a 
man fastens the cordage of his inborn hope 
to Jesus, the Infinite finitely expressed, and 
with adventuring loyalty accepts his assurance 
concerning the paradise of God, the joyous 
harp music from without will gather up the 
trembling melodies of his own heart's hopes 
and he will know with a knowledge as serene 
and steadfast as a mountain peak lifting 
through the mists that "beyond this life 
there is another life and in that life some work 
to do, some tasks to perform.'' It will not 
be the conclusion of a syllogism, but the 
perception of a fact. Logic has its worth, 
but it can be spared by those who see. 

This Christian sense of immortality does 
not stand by itself. It is involved in a mass 
of experienced truth. To subtract it from 
a life linked with God is like taking the 
sunshine out of a summer day; with its going 
the whole landscape fades away. The future 
life is more than a mere extension of years 
into infinite duration. We are already en- 



THE END OF THE QUEST 175 

tered into eternal life. Its timeless ages 
surge back to this very moment. Like the 
pipes of a great organ they give resonance 
to the years that now are. That there are 
discords is pitifully true. We are not wise 
enough yet to manage the pipes of eternity 
well. Or it may be that the minors of wailing 
here are necessary to the majors of praising 
there. What else could Paul mean when he 
says, "These light afflictions . • . shall work 
for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight 
of glory''? 

In the light of this evangel the commonest 
life becomes a path of gold running through 
time's sunset into the everlasting dawn. 
And what a wondrous break of day it is for 
the man who realizes that for him, even for 
him, the gates of eternal life swing wide. A 
vague, vast rapture rushes in upon him with 
the lift of never-ebbing tides behind. His 
feet are in the Way — do you wonder Paul 
called it so.^ — and the ages belong to him. He 
has passed the gates of death and of judg- 
ment and dwells already in the eternities. He 
has burst the bars of time and his aspirations 
and sure expectations are infinite in their reach. 



176 THE MASTER QUEST 

In a very marvelous telescopic fashion the 
risen Christ has brought the Land of the 
Beyond out of the haze of intimations and 
dim, high hopes, and has drawn it so near that 
it seems to tremble on the verge of sight. 
The shining of the Great White Throne awes 
us, the songs of the angel folk enrapture us, 
the quiet peace of the crystal sea calms our 
troubled hearts, the wide sweep of the 
River of Life allures us with its cool, delightful 
whisperings. When we lift up our souls, we 
touch a "sweepy garment, vast and white," 
we hear the soft, quick fall of feet that will 
never tread our streets again, and, in the 
night, sometimes, when we are wakeful and 
the other days drift past, we see 

"Those angel faces smile 
Which we have loved long since, and lost awhile." 

For the man who seeks breadth of life, God 
is the end of the quest. Surely, the Creator 
is ever greater than the work of his hands, 
the Thinker than his thoughts. The man 
who declares himself a citizen of the universe 
is less than he who holds himself a child of 
God. The keen scientist is simply searching 



THE END OF THE QUEST 177 

out some of God's lesser secrets, his common 
ways of doing things. "The heavens declare 
the glory of God: and the firmament showeth 
his handiwork/' The philosopher seeking 
after the essential truth builds his lofty 
rainbows in 

"Wondrous sequence 
Reaching in rare and rarer frequence 
Till the heaven of heavens is circumflexed." 

But when he has reared his mightiest arch 
of thought he can only bow in worshiping 
awe before the foot that shall emerge 

"From the straining, topmost dark. 
On to the keystone of that arc.'* 

The moralist finds in the rights and the 
wrongs of life only the broken reflections of 
the perfectness of God and the shadows that 
lie between. The philanthropist discovers 
traces of Godlikeness in broken and marred 
humanity, and learns that the love of God is 
broader than the measure of man's mind. 
The final beauty and the ultimate sublimity 
is in God. The man who thinks much of him 
will come into large knowledge and fine and 
catholic appreciations. As he gathers his 



178 THE MASTER QUEST 

life about God he passes from the provincial 
into the cosmopolitan; he ceases to be 
planetary and becomes universal. 

Brotherhood has been emphasized as the 
greatest possible opportunity for breadth of 
life. But Jesus as he reveals God is the su- 
preme teacher of simple brotherliness. This 
mutual relation occupies the highest place in 
his practical teachings. We should bear one 
another's burdens; we should dwell in fellow- 
ship; we should love the unlovable because 
they are his brothers, and ours; we should 
suffer anything rather than break the bond 
of brotherhood. 

The man who gives this message, reen- 
forced by the Master's devotion, the place it 
should occupy in his life, cannot escape en- 
largement. If he will read the Gospels with 
any degree of attention and honor Jesus with 
any real sincerity, he will inevitably move to- 
ward a warm and broad fraternity. The 
movements of history will have a new signifi- 
cance to him, for those who gave allegiance 
to any worthy cause in any land and century 
will become his comrades in ^'this holy war." 
Even those who battled for wrong will still 



THE END OF THE QUEST 179 

be brothers, to be blamed, doubtless, but 
gently, being brothers. Present world move- 
ments and the eddies of more ordinary events 
will be of concern to him, for they all affect 
some brothers of his for good or ill. All 
nations will become his neighbors, not only 
by their modern proximity, which by itself 
brings to pass nothing more than the urban 
impersonal cooperation, but in that delightful 
rural sense which includes a real interest and 
sympathy in their intimate affairs. His life 
will be made far broader because he loves 
men. 

Love must precede real knowledge of men. 
Since through the love he learns from Jesus 
a man comes into a sturdy affection for his 
brothers, he enters into a truer and deeper 
knowledge of them to the enrichment of his 
own life. In this fashion Simon, the fanatical 
patriot, came to know and value Matthew, 
the Roman taxgatherer. After that he could 
not be so narrowly patriotic. So Saul, the 
Separatist, learned that the Gentiles were 
worth saving and became the world-apostle. 
From John, Thomas, the skeptical, must 
have caught some assurance of faith, while 



180 THE MASTER QUEST 

it is very possible that the beloved disciple 
learned from the doubting one something of 
the stern logic that characterizes the fourth 
Gospel. So every follower of the Man from 
Nazareth finds it impossible to abide self- 
centered in affection or solitary in his 
knowledge of men. 

Every man who enters the comradeship of 
Jesus is fascinated by the revelation of 
intrinsic worth in the sinfulest that he opens 
to his eyes. Peter, the profane, had suflS- 
cient reverence latent in his soul, and Thomas 
enough faith, and fiery John adequate 
patience to be made apostles. Blind Barti- 
mseus, begging by the dusty road, was worth 
a miracle; Simon, the hypercritical Pharisee, 
and Zacchseus, the avaricious publican, were 
good enough to be his hosts. Even the loose- 
living Samaritan woman received the per- 
sonal announcement of his Messiahship and 
amply justified the Master's keen perception 
of soul-values. Judas was Jesus's sore dis- 
appointment because he might have been 
such a power in the beginnings of the King- 
dom if he had not persisted in wasting the 
genius that Jesus tried so hard to bind to 



THE END OF THE QUEST 181 

himself and to the cause. Michael Angelo 
looked upon a stained and marred block of 
marble and cried, "I see an angel in it/' So 
he redeemed the rejected stone into a 
masterpiece. Jesus teaches the man who 
walks with him to see princely men and 
queenly women in his stained and broken 
brothers and sisters, and he shows his follower 
how to redeem them into their possible 
beauty and strength. So the narrow-vis- 
ioned self-seeker becomes a broad-browed 
seer of souls and an artist in the redemption 
of men. 

This enlargement of hfe is winsomely set 
forth in that tender bit of a story about a 
Scotch shepherd who for the first time looked 
at a heather bloom through a microscope. 
Tears dimmed his sight, and he said softly, 
half laughing, half crying, "Aye, mon! mon! 
I didna know they were so bonnie, or I 
wouldna hae trod on ane o' them.'' If a 
man would live a great life, he must see 
through the eyes of Jesus the hidden values in 
the lives about him. So will he enter into 
the breadth of God. 

The man who seeks height of life must 



182 THE MASTER QUEST 

find the end of his quest in the fourth dimen- 
sion of God; for there is a divine altitude that 
transcends all our human habits of thought. 
To man standing alone, things must be 
possible. But once caught in the sweep of 
God, he must be prepared to assert the 
impossible. Any discussion of religion, 
whether in the halls of theology or on the 
streets of everyday, moves among the mys- 
teries. Those who believe they have a 
comprehensible scheme of salvation are like 
little children who fondly imagine they can 
imprison sunbeams in their chubby hands. 
Such theologians have mistaken their symbols 
for facts, their crude illustrative mechanism for 
the ways of God. And those other folks who 
insist that commonplace religion is "just the 
art of being kind" are apparently thinking 
in a single plane, failing to see how profoundly 
such an art must be rooted in the mysteries 
of God. 

When we penetrate beneath the surface 
film of spiritual phenomena we find ourselves 
in a mass of conceptions and experiences and 
conclusions so strangely inconsistent that we 
ask in our bewilderment, "What is truth?'' 



THE END OF THE QUEST 183 

But for the compulsion of the quest we might 
lay aside the whole matter. But our demand 
for room above us with other imperative 
soul-problems makes it necessary that we 
shall have, at least, a working hypothesis. 
So we dare to believe the impossible when it 
concerns God. 

For instance, we ask about the divine 
nature and find God to be absolute, omnipo- 
tent, infinite. But we must assert that man 
is God-related, morally free, individually 
personal. What can we do if we hold the 
faith, but assert a fourth dimension in which 
contradictions may be harmonized, a kind of 
spiritual geometry where two facts may 
occupy the same space at the same time.^ 
The poet's contradiction succinctly express- 
ing truth, "All's love; yet all's law," must 
be a fourth dimensional consistency. The 
church will not discover a complete theory 
of the atonement as long as it remains in the 
three dimensions of the flesh; but the im- 
portunate cry of the man who feels the weight 
of his guilt is for a sin-bearing Saviour and 
will not be denied. The fact of the atoning 
sacrifice we receive by faith as a mystery of 



184 THE MASTER QUEST 

God, but the process can be explained only 
in the terms of the spiritual dimension. 

The up-reaching faith and far-visioned 
hope of the van leaders of the church are 
rich with promise to us all. Luther caught 
his glimpse of the fourth dimension of the 
grace of God when there blazed into his heart 
as he knelt on the sacred stairway the splen- 
did words of prophet and apostle, "The just 
shall live by faith." The higher dimensions 
in the power of the Most High was revealed 
to Morrison as he stood so ludicrously inef- 
fective at the outer gate of vast, complex, 
impregnable China. When one asked him, 
"Do you think you can convert China?"' he 
made reply from a realm alien to his ques- 
tioner, "I cannot, but God can.'' "What is 
impossible with man is possible with God" 
because the Almighty works in more than 
three dimensions. David Livingstone gave 
himself for many years to crucifixion on the 
cross that his own long trails made in Africa. 
So he entered into the fourth dimension of joy 
when he declared: "I have never made a 
sacrifice for Jesus. It has all been boundless 
privilege." 



THE END OF THE QUEST 185 

The awkwardness of much testimony, the 
hyperbole and frequent incongruity of Chris- 
tian song, the cKnging grip of intercession as 
though man had a part in the counsels of the 
Godhead, the foolishness of faith, the heroic 
waste of devotion, all glow with a strange 
inner consistency and worth to those who 
have seen, now and again, the sudden, lifting 
glory of the further dimensions of our souls 
and of our God. 

Unlike our simple and superficial natural 
sciences, the science of the soul demands for 
its expression the formulas of the incompre- 
hensible. Our religious speech is made up 
of symbols, a kind of spiritual algebra. 
The most brilliant figures seem wholly inad- 
quate to our thought when we speak of the 
deep things. Paul apologizes for his awk- 
wardness by saying, ''I speak after the 
manner of men." When we see the reality 
back of our rhetoric we are borne down by a 
sense of our helplessness. Our souls and their 
experiences are so much vaster than our 
vocabularies. We know larger things than 
we can think. 

To those who earnestly pursue the quest 



186 THE MASTER QUEST 

for this Holy Grail, earth is increasingly 
crammed with heaven and every common 
bush is on fire before the approaching feet 
of God. They are exalted by unutterable 
apprehensions of impossible dimensions. They 
receive unspeakable gifts, enter into worlds of 
truth that beat about the narrow circle of 
human science and logic and philosophy. 
They are continually coming into the life 
more abundant. 

The end of the quest in all things is in God. 
Beyond him there is nothing more of length 
or breadth or height. Nor is there satisfac- 
tion for the aspirations of man this side of 
him. *'Our hearts were created to thee, O 
Lord,'* says Augustine, "and will never rest 
until they rest in thee." And the continu- 
ance of the quest is in God also. For all 
things lose their significance if God be 
denied. The problems of life have no answer, 
or are not worth the solving, if back of them 
there stand no Teacher giving them to us 
with boundless wisdom and loving intention. 
The beginning and the end, the strength and 
the enthusiasm, the meaning and the fullness 
of The Quest is God. 



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